Well, This Is a Surprise

A man has been awarded $137 million because of blatantly racist treatment while he was at Tesla.

Hoocoodanode that a man whose family fortune is steeped in Apartheid would sanction racism on his shop floor?

A fish rots from the head, and the response of HR and management to horrific, and illegal, behavior was classic Musk, to tell them to suck it up:

A federal jury in San Francisco has ordered Tesla to pay nearly $137 million to a Black elevator operator who accused the carmaker of ignoring racial abuse he faced while working at the automaker’s factory.

The plaintiff, Owen Diaz, said he worked at the factory in Fremont, Calif., for about a year in 2015 and 2016. There, he said, a supervisor and other colleagues repeatedly referred to him using racial slurs. He gave an account of his experience in a 2018 article in The New York Times.

In an interview on Monday evening, Mr. Diaz said he was relieved by the jury’s verdict, delivered earlier in the day. “It took four long years to get to this point,” he said. “It’s like a big weight has been pulled off my shoulders.”

He said employees had drawn swastikas and scratched a racial epithet in a bathroom stall and left drawings of derogatory caricatures of Black children around the factory. Despite repeated complaints, the company did little to address the behavior, he said.

These people should not complain, because there is free FroYo on the shop floor.  (Seriously, Musk actually said that about issues at the Tesla factory) 

………

The jury agreed with Mr. Diaz’s assertion that Tesla had created a hostile work environment by failing to address the racism he faced. A vast majority of the award — $130 million — was punitive damages against the company. The rest, $6.9 million, was for past and future noneconomic damages to Mr. Diaz.

………

In a message to Tesla staff members that was posted on the company’s website, Valerie Capers Workman, a human resources executive, noted that Mr. Diaz was a contractor, not a Tesla employee, and played down the allegations in the lawsuit.

“In addition to Mr. Diaz, three other witnesses (all non-Tesla contract employees) testified at trial that they regularly heard racial slurs (including the N-word) on the Fremont factory floor,” she wrote. “While they all agreed that the use of the N-word was not appropriate in the workplace, they also agreed that most of the time they thought the language was used in a ‘friendly’ manner and usually by African-American colleagues.”

I hope that someone is selling lawsuit futures against Tesla, because it's clear that they are not going to fix this, but instead will continue to tell employees, as Musk in a company email, "It is important to be thick-skinned."

This is not a recipe for a harmonious workplace.