Ex-Tesla Employee Called Racial Slur Wins Rare $1M Award | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Tesla Employee Called Racial Slur Wins Rare $1M Award

bloomberg.com

35 pointsmseidl43 comments

Slightly off topic, but the biggest eye opener in this article for me was this:

> Three-quarters of the $1.02 million award is for Berry’s attorneys’ fees and legal costs. Rushing also directed Tesla to pay the ex-employee $266,278.50 in damages, including $100,000 to compensate for emotional distress.

People here on HN can be very quick to make the claim "it's illegal to do X" as though that solves the problem.

This appears to be about as clear cut a case as you could imagine (for it to be granted against Tesla in arbitration). Could you imagine spending 4 years and $750,000 for a _chance_ at being told you were right, and rewarded less than you souos have made if you had just continued working for them over that time.

Back on topic, this man was treated horrifyingly, and Tesla's defense of "is absolutely against any form of discrimination, harassment, or unfair treatment of any kind" is laughable, it must be such a slap in the face for Mr. Berry to be told that by an army of lawyers after going through what he did.

yeah, the real winners here seems to be lawyers.

> Could you imagine spending 4 years and $750,000 for a _chance_ at being told you were right

Did Berry spend $750,000? A $750,000 attorneys' fees award doesn't imply that he paid them anything, or that he would have had to pay them anything if he'd lost the case.

You're right there's some subtlety in the wording, and my simplification of the figures doesn't help. It doesn't change the fact that he didn't get a 1 million dollar award personally, and that legal fees of 750,000 were paid from that award. We don't know what he wouls have had to pay if he lost, but it I was reading this as someone going through an abusive workplace and considerih arbitration, the fear of even being asked for 10% of that 750k legal bill would push me to not do it.

The payment agreement is made in advance; it doesn't come as a surprise once the judgment is announced.

> We don't know what he wouls have had to pay if he lost

These cases are taken on contingency, so if they lost, the lawyer gets nothing. This is compensated by the large percentage of fees in the case of a win.

> These cases are taken on contingency

Do you have a source for that?

> is absolutely against any form of discrimination, harassment, or unfair treatment of any kind

It's truly bizarre that any company that spews this PR canned response implies that their (likely thousands) supervisors/leaders universally uphold the company values. You can have corporate policies and virtues until you're blue in the face, it doesn't mean shit if those policies aren't aggressively enforced.

The truth is that Tesla doesn't stand for a single thing, apart from their bottom line.

>caps years of complaints from Black workers that Tesla turned a blind eye to the commonplace use of racial slurs on the assembly line and was slow to clean up graffiti with swastikas and other hate symbols scrawled in common areas

Is this a shitty middle school or a company? I would imagine it's not very easy to get a job at Tesla, including for assembly line work. I'd be shocked if it happened once, let alone repeatedly, and let alone with a slow clean-up response.

If it were one employee making the accusation, I'd believe it, and since it's allegedly multiple employees, I especially doubt it's false.

It all comes from the top. Elon Musk is a wannabe edgelord and that culture cascades down throughout his companies.

Musk’s tweets include a lot of memes, including drugs memes, yes.

However, I have not seen even one thing from Musk personally which is a racial slur I’m familiar with[0], nor anything politically authoritarian — if anything, he seems anarchic.

All that said, I’m glad this person got justice, and it’s shameful it took so long.

[0] racial slurs vary from place to place, so perhaps I’m just blind to them?

I'm no musk expert but he once got into a twitter fight where he called the guy a pedo. Which he later categorized as a "generic insult." To be clear, pedo is not racial, but it is certainly a slur. When you have a CEO publicly calling someone a pedo as a generic insult, it's easy to see how that desensitizes workers towards other slurs being used casully.

Not saying that Musk should be personally blamed for whatever racist hotbeds exist in Tesla. But as a CEO, you really need to be a role model, because anything you do will be magnified 10x by others.

> Case law is clear that one instance of a supervisor directing the N-word at a subordinate is sufficient to constitute severe harassment

What? Co-workers bantering, maybe, but a manager or supervisor doing something like that in my country would make them virtually unemployable.

When would you ever call a subordinate something like that?

Maybe you can do it if you're black yourself and have a lot of familiarity with the person you called that name. But even if it was the case, justice is blind

That's unlikely to be the case given the lawsuit. Also, that's the difference between the hard "r" and the "a". You will be hard pressed to find a black person using the hard "r".

I don’t think context matters when it comes to that word. See these examples…

https://time.com/5706848/black-security-guard-wisconsin-n-wo...

https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/7/17/17581558/papa-john-...

https://variety.com/2018/film/news/jonathan-friedland-netfli...

"...court filings reveal that the arbitrator found Berry’s allegations more credible than Tesla’s denials, ..."

So this was a he said/she said case?

No. It was arbitration, not a case first off. Secondly berry's allegations may be backed up by actual proof, which is not discussed in this article. Thirdly, almost all cases (short of DNA proof) are they-said, and it's up to an independent third party to find out where the truth lies.

I used to work for a credit card company. There was an employee that ran his mortgage business on the side during most of the day at work.

So, the company went to fire him. He claimed racism (he was Indian) and sued for $1M. The credit card company not wanting any bad publicity settled giving him nearly that entire amount.

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