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.
Forced arbitration isn't just either, but the court system hasn't left much room for alternative with such overreaching punishments.
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.
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.
$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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> The jury awarded more than attorneys asked for their client, including $130 million in punitive damages and $6.9 million for emotional distress.
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.
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.
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.
And maybe that should force the powers that be (state-level? federal-level? not sure) to make that enforcement illegal.
Some examples: https://www.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1UA2CH
https://www.morellilaw.com/the-biggest-injury-verdict-reduct...
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.
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.
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?
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.
In all fairness it was not on the HN main page the first 3 hours, see: https://upvotetracker.com/post/hn/28755257
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).