Tesla must pay $137M to ex-worker over hostile work environment, racism
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
How do you even prove such a thing? Especially 5 years after you have left the place. And how does it not become a case of he said, she said?
7th amendment says otherwise.
>“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. 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.”
Only a fraction of that money should be awarded to the victim. The rest could as well go to charity, or our public health system, etc.
The risk of frivolous litigation does not even register as a problem. The amount a company pays in damages is a factor of the corporation's size, and a consequence of what it takes to actually make them fix a systemic problem so that no one has to live with it.
Otherwise, corporations could foster extremely toxic work environment and company cultures and any consequence would be written off as an operational cost.
Also, mega corporations like Tesla do have their own dedicated HR and legal departments, so I'm sure they can handle an occasional court case.
"The rest could as well go to charity, or our public health system".
What's a single person going to do with $100M.
It would have been enough for a bunch of schools
I'll go ahead and say that if no important detail is left out of the story, 137 millions being awarded for verbal abuse during 1 year of employment is insane and clearly shows why the company has mandatory arbitration agreements.
I do chuckle at how much money from each subsequent tesla sale will be going to pay down this lawsuit. 127mil / 500k = 254$ per car for a year. Given the price of a new Tesla that doesn't actually seem very big, and will certainly be reduced on appeal.
And maybe that should force the powers that be (state-level? federal-level? not sure) to make that enforcement illegal.
Totally agree, from the article:
> faced a hostile work environment in which, he told the court, colleagues used epithets to denigrate him and other Black workers, told him to “go back to Africa” and left racist graffiti in the restrooms and a racist drawing in his workspace.
Yes, maybe this amount of money will convince companies like Tesla to actually do something. Hit them where it hurts, and 127 million per one worker should hurt.
Forced arbitration isn't just either, but the court system hasn't left much room for alternative with such overreaching punishments.
Don't make a hostile work environment or fuck around and find out?
Theres literally a pending class action against Tesla for this. They have a systemic problem that they're going to have to address or keep getting fined. 137 million is pennies for the company anyway.
Some might find this hard to believe but it's really easy not to be racist. It really really is.
... so same problem, different layer of abstraction.
Doesn't change the fact that running a company creates a duty of care. It's hard to build safe cars if your workers worry that they're going to get shouted down with something that belongs in the 1920s.
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I really would be keen for a deeper understanding of what went wrong in Tesla's sociotechnical systems that led to someone in such a position of leadership responding exercising power with such little attention to their word choice.
I don't think that, but I lack the communication skill to be sufficiently clear to avoid being misunderstood in this medium on this topic.
People have a right to form groups and freely interact with others to the extent that they chose - that's a right not a privilege.
The absurdity of the arguments in this threat are revealing - HN is normally viscerally against any kind of authoritarian appeal, hacking on cops for arresting actual criminals ... but for this one ... they're supporting coercive and completely disproportionate actions by the state?
Because someone was called some names and meant to feel bad about themselves?
You can see how quickly the hand of angry populist authoritarianism comes out, like a bad religious movement, whenever it triggers some group's sensitivities.
I'm not disagreeing that the state should be given limited to zero say on the assembly of people but companies should not be framed as the counterweight against authoritarianism but another manifestation of it.
First: If you are in a leadership position, you have a duty of care to the way you practice leadership. And yes, a lot leadership consists of the language you use.
Second: Someone feeling bad isn’t the problem here. The problem is choosing words which set company cultural norms to be hostile to employees based on unchangeable characteristics of their birth unrelated to the purpose of the group.
Third: People do have a right to form groups and a wide range of norms they have a right to set within those groups. That right is constrained by certain responsibilities —- one of which is to be less racist!
No, not really. Just because you managed to put together a business model and get an investor to trust you with some cash that does not mean you have a greenlight from society to act as racist and as sexist as you desire. Everyone around you still has the right to be treated with respect and not be subjected to any sort of abuse, specially those that are actively working to validate your business and make you rich.
In fact, allowing for a racist/sexist work environment to fester is an incredibly stupid move, as you're hindering productivity and limiting your access to skilled employees.
"They didn't put in the accessibility ramp - stop capitalism now!"
So once again - hyperbole - this time with a strawman thrown in for good measure.
Nobody is remotely suggesting someone shouldn't be able to go to work and not be called racial slurs.
The issue is a) to what degree this is systematic and a part of company function and b) proportionality.
The ruling is unreasonable and stupid, it's driven by greed, ideology and a 'law by litigation' approach to everything, which doesn't bode well for anyone.
The federal court already concluded that the racism problem at Tesla was widespread and systematic, and was aided by the company's internal arbitration process which was bad enough that a Tesla shareholder voiced concerns it "enabled harassment and other problems".
The proportionality was obviously well justified, given that the bulk of it corresponded to punitive damages. The whole point of punitive damages is to punish the defendant, which is a company with an estimated market value of 800 billion dollars.
If there was any doubt regarding how well justified was the decision, you can simply look at how the ruling motivated Tesla's shareholders to address its racism and harassment problem right in their shareholder's meeting. This has been a long lasting problem at Tesla which has been festering for years, with multiple similar complaints handled (and muffled) internally, but it took this court ruling to finally get the company to address it.
Probably only need 10 people. Say they're paid $300k each. This would be about break even (assuming a 40 year worklife, slightly short) for a lifetime's wages.
Which is a big deal, but hardly <<super>> serious jail time. The risk-reward here looks like it might be a bit skewed. $137 million is not a normal amount of money. It only looks like $130k if you ignore the logarithmic nature of the Hindu-Arabic number system.
That said, the ratio between the punitive damages and the direct compensation to the victim clearly intends send a message to other companies. Unfortunately, the ones that are able to pay these fines - which they are, effectively - won't ever be persuaded to change their ways, and will continue to seek other legal avenues to shield themselves from their responsibilities.
$130 million dollars of the award is punitive damages. They aren't supposed to compensate the victim. They are supposed to punish Tesla and force them to follow the law in the future.
The penalty needs to be large enough that it significantly hurts Tesla.
Well, shareholders who voiced concerns regarding systemic racism in Tesla sought to actually fix the problem by looking into the arbitration process and making it clear they do not tolerate racism.
I'm afraid some of the comments in this thread are directly advocating against any need for Tesla to address systemic racism, and instead are deeply invested in blaming the victim.
If every claim of hostile workplace involved a high up person yelling at black people to go back to Africa maybe a whole bunch of companies deserve to get hit with fines that actually encourage them to stop enabling that stuff, or go bankrupt and be replaced by companies that don’t tolerate their leadership doing that stuff.
Also most business are not racist nor hostile to the extent Tesla is described by the victims, otherwise they would indeed be shut down.
Your cameras and microphones argument makes no sense. Racist graffitis in the restroom does not require big brother level of surveillance for the company to start an internal investigation.
Also mandatory arbitration agreements is obviously used to avoid both dealing with toxic behavior inside the company and public backlash.
No. This incentivizes companies to take complains seriously. Tesla isn't being punished because an employee did something. Employees always do things. Tesla is being punished for allowing the behavior to continue for an extended period of time. They don't need to install cameras to detect/prevent every occurrence. They need to institute a functional system that detects and handles repeat offenders. That might be as simple as a means for complaints to be lodged, investigated and acted upon. And when they find people acting like this, yes they do need to actually fire them.
Punishments that are disproportionate to the offense are never a good policy. Ask any people who were on the receiving end of those throughout history. Just because it's a company being punished, does not change anything fundamentally. It's still an insane punishment for a single offense.
It's telling that almost nobody would choose non-hostile working conditions over being paid off more than they will earn in a lifetime even as a senior employee. When litigation is so significantly more desirable than the supposedly desirable outcome of non-hostile work environment, you have a much bigger problem than what you'd started with.
This is a civil matter, not criminal. The punishment is proportional to both the crime and the size of the defendant. A bug company will always require a greater level of punishment in order to induce change.
Consider. While the intent may be punitive damages to dissuade the bad actor from bad actions in the future, the effect is often instead resentment by many towards the awardee. This then perpetuates a cycle of suspicion, hostility, and potentially harms minorities rather than helping them, as this cycle inevitably anneals into right-wing politics. On a small scale, this might be an employer deciding to avoid hiring minorities in order to avoid the risk of a huge settlement. On a large scale, a country could go to war over reparations that they felt were unjust.
I think there’s a happy medium. Let the awardee have an award equivalent to their actual harm - and the punitive damages all go to charity, or to a governmental or quango fund to combat the issues that have caused the fund to grow.
This inhibits selfish motivations and the perceptions of them, and would still perform the same function in terms of punishment.
And this puts burden on both companies and legal system in general. Which I don't think is very desired.
> The jury awarded more than attorneys asked for their client, including $130 million in punitive damages and $6.9 million for emotional distress.
Paying the massive payout to worker and attorneys, just seems insane and resulting frivolous suites. Not saying this one was one.
That always sounds like a good idea but isn't really practical. It makes government a party to every lawsuit, matters that are supposed to be between two parties. The court is supposed to be the neutral arbitrator. Having the government raking in money from the civil judgements creates perverse incentives.
I condemn any discrimination and I am ok with tesla getting hard slapped, but it fill like an overkill for what happen to them.
They could make them pay few mil to the person and rest to charity or something.
What this will 'incentivize' is absolutely everyone suing their employer, right now, for discrimination of some kind.
Being called some choice things is bad, but there are worse things that happen in this world, particularly in the area of safety.
The damages need to be commensurate with the actions, not some kind of incentive driven thing.
You'd expect to see this at a public toilet, etched into school furniture, or at the urinal at a dive bar, but this has a totally different vibe in a workplace where everyone is being paid to be there, and colleagues need to trust each other. The 137 million payout does seem extreme, but it's probably just adequate to incentivize a company with the turnover of Tesla to improve its policies (and outcomes).
No. You're going to fuck around and find out. As did Tesla.
Don't expect me to develop a thick skin. The person paying $137 mil can do that.
Tesla claims to have a zero tolerance policy in place, so that excuse doesn't work for long term harassment. They basically admitted to a complete enforcement failure of their own policies. So the question is if Teslas management is that incompetent or racist and why their meme lord in charge hasn't done anything to fix the issue (outside of forced arbitration to silence workers).
Some examples: https://www.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1UA2CH
https://www.morellilaw.com/the-biggest-injury-verdict-reduct...
In all fairness it was not on the HN main page the first 3 hours, see: https://upvotetracker.com/post/hn/28755257
I think its entirely reasonable given the size of the company.
I mean they have arbitration agreements which caused the abuse to get this bad, not the other way around.
The courts could have put this money into a accidents found or a orphanage or what ever.
I guess many people think that the law has been stretched here too far, but prefer not to comment as this could be considered "racist".
Because in the United States, it is the responsibility of those morons' manager to discipline them for that kind of behaviour (And the responsibility of his manager to discipline him, if he fails to do so, and so on, and so on up the chain.) If the manager had done so this would have far more likely been a $0 settlement, rather than a $137M one.
The company, instead, chose to protect those racist morons, rather than protect the plaintiff. Now it's discovering why this is not a smart corporate behaviour, and why it should not repeat it in the future.
If the one time you catch a shoplifter, the only punishment he'd get is having to pay for the item, every single person entering a store would start stealing.
A ton of it will evaporate before reaching the plaintiff. A huge part must be punitive damage for Tesla, and they'll appeal and some court in the middle with play the "poor poor Tesla" song and slash it to nothing.
Then the plaintiff will still have been in the news for these 137 millions, be paraded as some abuser of the system, while having been abused for one year, losing their job and getting mostly nothing out of the whole thing.
That makes me wish Tesla would have to actually pay and the guy runs away with these 137 millions that are just a drop in the bucket for Tesla and won't be in our pockets either way. Just let him have his money, it's not like he's an enemy of humanity or 20 thousand copycats will try to get abused in the elevator for a year.
Because wise people have humility about their ability to communicate clearly with strangers about trauma-related topics.
but if this fine is for a systemic widespread problem, then there must have been many victims. why does the entire fine go to just one of them?
edit: we can switch roles if you prefer
An absolutely trivial conspiracy to pull off, especially given that the median payout for this is closer to ~zero dollars, and most likely, a ruined career for everyone involved, and federal prison time, if any of this is sussed out. Maybe the Donald will give you a pardon once he returns to the presidency, on July 4th, 2023, or whenever.
Feel free to give it a shot, and let us know how it turns out. Meanwhile, I'm a bit busy conspiring with my buddy to become the CEO and the CFO of Tesla, respectively, so that we can take all it's money and fly to the Bahamas.
Tesla's case was tad more serious than one employee shouting random racist remarks at another employee.
The article mentions a long pattern of racism to the point it became a part of the company's culture, a few former employees who complained about the systemic problem, a company-enforced arbitration process that systematically brushed complains under the rug as standard operating procedure, and a problem so widespread that a shareholder felt compelled to raise the issue in the company's annual shareholder meeting.
Quoted from the article:
> Institutional Shareholder Services, the proxy advisory firm, recommended shareholders vote for Nia’s proposal, noting that Tesla has faced many serious allegations of sexual and racial harassment and discrimination over the years.
- Mr. Diaz never worked for Tesla. He was a contract employee who worked for Citistaff.
- Mr. Diaz worked as an elevator operator at the Fremont factory for nine months, from June 2015 to March 2016.
- 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. 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. They also told the jury about racist graffiti in the bathrooms, which was removed by our janitorial staff;
- There was no witness testimony or other evidence that anyone ever heard the n-word used toward Mr. Diaz.
- Mr. Diaz made written complaints to his non-Tesla supervisors. Those were well-documented in the nine months he worked at our factory. But he didn’t make any complaints about the n-word until after he was not hired full-time by Tesla – and after he hired an attorney.
- The three times that Mr. Diaz did complain about harassment, Tesla stepped in and made sure responsive and timely action was taken by the staffing agencies: two contractors were fired and one was suspended (who had drawn a racially offensive cartoon). Mr. Diaz himself testified that he was “very satisfied” with the results of one of the investigations, and he agreed that there was follow-up on each of his complaints.
- Even though Mr. Diaz now complains about racial harassment at Fremont, at the time he said he was being harassed, he recommended to his son and daughter – while they were all living together in the same home – that they work at Tesla with him.
" the case was only able to move forward because Diaz had not signed one of Tesla’s mandatory arbitration agreements which the company uses to force employees to resolve disputes without a public trial"
I think this is something very US-specific that is it legal to have an agreement that someone gives up basic citizen right like going to court and the right to have a public trial.
In most countries something like this is just an abusive clause in the contract and is invalid automatically.
At least in EU, we try to have laws to prevent things. In US there are less such laws, but you are able to sue for huge amounts of money. Kind of like "ask permission" vs "ask forgiveness".
At least that is how I see it, so correct me if I'm totally off here.
> an arbitrator hired by Tesla to resolve the case in a series of closed-door hearings agreed the slurs weren't racist. Rather, they were "consistent with lyrics and images commonly found in rap songs and freestyle rap competitions," retired Marin County Judge Lynn Duryee wrote in a decision reviewed by Protocol. In a footnote, Duryee cited lyrics on genius.com for a song by Insanity, a little-known Canadian rapper.
Which is a bit ironic considering Musk himself was born in South Africa.
Imagine if some middle manager at the Toyota plant in Indiana was racist towards an Asian American shift worker, telling them to "go back to Japan!" It's that level of unimaginable stupidity. While I don't question the veracity of the claims, it's genuinely difficult for me to believe that that kind of cartoonish racism still exists, especially in California.
Would Tesla be open to lawsuits if they fired African-American colleagues who used racial slurs (including the n- word) in a "friendly" manner?
From the article:
“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. 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.”
It's hard to really judge the context from here; none of us were there, and I didn't read the full court report either (as most of us haven't). In another article Diaz said "some days I would just sit on my stairs and cry" so I'm gonna guess the context wasn't particularly friendly.
It's still possible that there was a mismatch in how it was intended: the offenders intended it in a friendly way, but that's not how it was taken. It can happen to the best of us sometimes. One mistake is one mistake and can happen, but to be honest you need to be pretty darn tone-deaf to not notice that someone is uncomfortable from someone's response in both verbal and non-verbal clues, or a bit of an asshole to choose to ignore this.
All in all, based on the reporting I find the "it was intended in a friendly manner" rather unconvincing, even when we give people the benefit of the doubt. Was it truly "racist"? I don't know; I'll withhold that judgement. But at the very least it strikes me as insensitive and unkind.
Sadly, his victory will no doubt lead to fewer low paid roles in big firms as CEOs will not like it that even the littlest man or woman can hold behemoths to account: a big motivator for automation.
Personally, if i found my working conditions inadequate, i'd just leave and look for different opportunities because to a relatively low paid people like myself getting on any sort of a blacklist or getting negative publicity would be career ending, i probably could not afford court expenses or the mental toll something like that would take, and just generally am not a person who'd want to sue others and stir trouble (like many people, i'd assume), but what other reasons are there for people to look at employment and lawsuits as an unethical "get rich quick" scheme?
Disclaimer: don't assume that i condone any of the above or would like to see a world in which abusive behaviour cannot rightfully be settled in court. However, I'm curious about the mechanisms in place to prevent the exploitation of the court system. This is especially relevant because of patent trolling and insurance fraud in certain countries.