A Tesla was ordered to pay 3.2 million US dollars (about 16 million reais) to a black man who claimed the company was ignorant of the racial slurs he faced while working in a California plant. The amount is much less than the $137 million another court awarded two years ago, mostly in punitive damages. The judge in that decision later reduced the amount to $15 million, prompting plaintiff Owen Diaz to contest the amount in a new lawsuit.

But instead of big money, he will leave with less. After a five-day trial, the jury awarded $3 million in punitive damages and $175,000 in past and future non-economic damages.

Diaz said he was repeatedly subjected to racist abuse while working as a contractor at Tesla’s Fremont plant, near San Francisco, in 2015 and 2016. Workers also wrote racist epithets and drew symbols and cartoons around the factory, he said.

Diaz claimed that the insults had an emotional impact on him and that he reported the problems to the company, but Tesla did little to address them. He said he endured the war until his son started working in a factory and faced the same treatment.

” The prevalence of the use of the word N in Tesla’s workplace is evidence that they didn’t care how their African-American employees felt.Bernard Alexander, one of Díaz’s lawyers, said in his closing remarks at the latest trial.It was a complete insult to every African American in the workplace.“

The defense tried to minimize the consequences.

Tesla’s lawyers suggested that Diaz exaggerated the impact and extent of the racial harassment he faced, prompting the jury to downplay the award.

But the company’s responsibility for creating a hostile work environment for Diaz and failing to prevent racial harassment was not upheld in court. This has already been “finally determined,” Judge William H. Orrick said at jury briefings. Instead, it was the jury’s duty to determine how much Diaz should receive.

Following a 2021 lawsuit, Tesla’s head of human resources said the company fired two contractors and suspended another in response to Diaz’s complaints. The executive acknowledged that the company wasn’t perfect in 2015 and 2016, but said it has moved forward since then.

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Source: CNN

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