[flagged]
Everything you've ever said is "just words". Everything someone has said that has hurt you, that has caused fear in you, that evoked love and warmth has ever been " just words".
How many of those words changed your life? The "I dos", the last words, the first words, the words said in a dark alley or the words said to you pushed up against a wall.
Words tell you what someone thinks of you, what they'll do to you.
I, for example, don't think very much of your comment.
Yes words can have consequences. Let's take politics, some parties get elected based on their words, and then implement policies that are harmful to me. I still never got any kind of compensation for that kind of thing.
How much money should ehticalsmacker be awarded from you, because you not thinking much of his comment hurt his feelings?
I'm not going to argue you with you.
jszymborski comments did not break the law.
Tesla violations of employment laws regarding a hostile work environment did break the law.
Two different juries decided that Tesla broke the law, and that punitive damages were needed to deter that behavior in the future.
What law is jszymborski breaking? What court is applicable? None.
Your comment suggests you think financial payment to an HN user with hurt feelings due to another user "not thinking much of his comment" is either good or justified.
I find that hard to believe.
On the other hand, decades ago the US decided that it's neither good nor justified to have a hostile work environment - something I agree with - and put laws and systems into place to enforce that belief.
That's what the lawsuit is about.
Yet I also find it hard to believe you support a hostile work environment.
That makes your comment seen like neither here nor there.
I don't think people should pay other users because of their comments. On the contrary, my argument was that they shouldn't have to pay.
As for hostile work environments, my opinion is that people should simply quit their jobs if they are unhappy with their work environment. I don't think governments should interfere with how companies conduct their business.
I even think racism should be legal. Don't get me wrong - I don't like racism. But the government shouldn't be allowed to tell people who they have to like or dislike. If somebody doesn't want to work with somebody else because they don't like their nose or whatever, it should be in their rights to refuse to work with them. In general, people should be allowed to do with their money as they please, so also to pay for work who they want.
One thing I heard is that the guy in question here even tried to get a relative a position at Tesla, which seems odd if he thought the work environment was so bad. Not sure if that is true, though.
> Your argument was that
No, my argument was that the two situations are not meaningfully comparable. I then explained why.
Even if the law isn't good or correct, the two situations are still not meaningfully comparable, because the awarded damages requires that the law exist.
> simply quit their jobs if they are unhappy with their work environment
Ahh, sounds like a libertarian in favor of the Lochner era. I strongly disagree with what I see as a naive belief in the freedom of contract.
As you correctly point out, it means allowing racial and sexual discrimination in the workplace, with people like Oncale quitting his job with Sundowner because "I felt that if I didn't leave my job, that I would be raped or forced to have sex."
That's the freedom of contract you want.
Those were not good times to be an lowly employee. I suppose they were great times to be a manager and business owner, if you didn't care much about others.
> get a relative a position at Tesla, which seems odd if he thought the work environment was so bad
While I haven't read much about the case, it's clear you've read far less. From the judge's opinion in the first trial, at https://casetext.com/case/diaz-v-tesla-inc-4 :
] After several months at Tesla, Diaz recommended that his son (and former plaintiff) Demetric Di-Az come to work at the Tesla facility. See, e.g., Tr. at 503:8-16. He testified that he “did believe he would be in a different location” so the situation might be different for him. Id. at 503:11-19. He said that he could not recall whether he warned Di-Az about the racial harassment. Id. at 504:5-11. At one point, Diaz witnessed a white supervisor yell at Demetric that, “I can't stand all you [fucking] [N-words].” Id. at 419:18-24. Diaz said that it “broke” him. Id. at 420:1. He testified that, if he had to do it over again, he would not have recommended that Demetric work there, calling it his “biggest mistake.” Id. at 420:2-5.
Note that his son was a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit. The opinion doesn't say why it was dismissed, but the other co-plaintiff settled the case with Telsa.
> As you correctly point out, it means allowing racial and sexual discrimination in the workplace, with people like Oncale quitting his job with Sundowner because "I felt that if I didn't leave my job, that I would be raped or forced to have sex.
Why would you want to continue working for somebody who wants to force you to have sex?
>Those were not good times to be an lowly employee. I suppose they were great times to be a manager and business owner, if you didn't care much about others.
In a good economy, you can find another job. In a bad economy, as socialism is notorious to bring about, you can't. So congrats, you are entitled to keep your job with the boss who wants to rape you.
> While I haven't read much about the case, it's clear you've read far less
"He believed he would be in another location" - so he didn't believe Tesla was racist at heart?
To compensate this harm, I am suing you for 3 billions $$ + legal fees, since I know you are not poor and come to HN. My lawyers will contact you.
And there you go, you just did exactly what you criticize on others and put yourself above somebody else. Hell, that's another trauma for me, now its 4 billions since I have panic attack now from your toxic posts.
I always find it interesting when people who are willing to accept the arbitrariness of the LISP interpreter or JavaScript's market dominance or the C++ curiously recurring template pattern get shocked or surprised that the United States' framework of law and legal precedent is arbitrary and path-dependent and does not conform to their (also arbitrary and path-dependent) sense of fairness.
The definition of a hostile work environment is not "said something to me I didn't like". Quoting the EEOC at https://www.archives.gov/files/eeo/policy/facts-about-workpl... :
"... the anti-discrimination statutes are not a general civility code, Federal law does not prohibit simple teasing, off-hand comments, or isolated incidents that are not extremely serious. Rather, the conduct must be so objectively offensive as to alter the conditions of the individual’s employment."
The juries - in two different trials! - have determined that the conduct at Tesla meets that threshold.
Tesla is legally obligated to prevent workplace harassment, and respond to complaints about harassment. They did not do so. Punitive damages for Tesla's illegal behavior form the large part of the awarded amount.
I think there is more to the story than CNN reports, also, just because something has been made into a law, it isn't beyond discussion or criticism. There are many bad laws in existence.
This can get you started: https://news.sky.com/story/elon-musks-lies-about-tesla-on-tw...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/elon-musk-twitter-te...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/tesla-shareholde...
https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1596118994565894145?lan...
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4020362-who-you-gonna-belie...
You can keep defending him if you want, but the preponderance of evidence is not on his side. On average, I would no longer consider Elon Musk a reliable source.
1.) he doesn't have to justify reinstating Trump at all. People who banned a sitting president have to justify their actions 2.) Seriously, what the fuck - you want to hold his dying child against him? This is ridiculous nitpicking, you can say "it died in his arms" even if he wasn't holding his child all the time. You should take a long hard look into the mirror and ponder what your irrational hatred does to your personality. 3.) A couple of cars with a tiny discount proves what? A list of 30 cars, with a generously calculated average discount of 3%, out of probably thousands sold?
Keep hating, though. Your hatred is irrelevant.
... but some of that earning was done via deception. Look at the history of billionaire CEOs, and you quickly learn that bending or breaking with the truth is pretty much mandatory at some point in their careers to win the game. They are salespeople for the firms they helm, and a certain amount of sales is based on deception (information asymmetry is the beating heart of the engine of profit).
If anything, one can tip one's hat to him for winning the game he's playing so well. The game itself may be of questionable virtue, but he's an excellent player of it.
(Possibly except for this Twitter acquisition. That was a weird move. I don't think it's working out the way he'd hoped).
The only lie he tells consistently that I hold against him is Tesla's FSD. Even the name is incorrect in terms of what the technology is capable of, and it's a lie that gets naive people killed when they believe the marketing hype and turn over full control of their vehicle to a technology that is not yet reliable.
Can't say I rank that very high in terms of deceptions, as it doesn't involve the actual product, and also, in the end it was true that entity 1 also gave them funding. And entity 2 could have given funding under the condition that entity 1 gives funding, to be safe.
As for FSD, as far as I know it is still officially in beta and they officially say you can't rely on it just yet. I don't share his optimism for its development, but it seems conceivable that he legitimately thought it was doable in the timeframe he imagined. I don't think missing delivery dates really counts as lie. Companies do it all the time, even companies like Apple. They announce they are working on product x and expect to have it ready at time y, and frequently they miss the date y by years of sometimes even scrap the product completely.
I also haven't heard of an increase in accidents because of Tesla FSD. The accidents that happens seem to all make the news and on close scrutiny turn out to be nothingburgers.
Edit: this seems to suggest that Teslas with autopilot have far fewer accidents than normal cars https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/1144/teslas-using-autopilo... - I supposer you can find all sorts of other statistics, though. I haven't really looked into them. Googling, one finds many headlines of the sort "most vehicles involved in automated driving accidents are Teslas" which are of course misleading bullshit, as presumably that is just an artefact of the much higher number of Teslas on the road.
There are also many companies with illegally discriminatory workplace environments in existence.
Just because "pedo guy" Musk claims something doesn't mean it's beyond criticism.
There's always more than what's reported in the news. It's not like we're going to read the court transcripts.
Please be specific about what's wrong with this law, otherwise it seems like you are blowing smoke to minimize Tesla's blame.
I'll quote from the first opinion at https://casetext.com/case/diaz-v-tesla-inc-4 as a starting point:
> The jury heard that the Tesla factory was saturated with racism. Diaz faced frequent racial abuse, including the N-word and other slurs. Other employees harassed him. His supervisors, and Tesla's broader management structure, did little or nothing to respond. And supervisors even joined in on the abuse, one going so far as to threaten Diaz and draw a racist caricature near his workstation. ...
> On Diaz's second day of work, Diaz saw the N-word scratched into a bathroom stall. Id. at 401:6-12. Over the course of his employment, more racist bathroom graffiti was added. Id. at 403:5-15. He encountered swastikas and the phrase “death to all [N-words].” ...
> The jury, in special verdicts, found that: (1) Tesla subjected Diaz to a racially hostile work environment, (2) Tesla was a joint employer of Diaz, (3) Diaz was subject to a hostile work environment caused by a supervisor, (4) Diaz was subject to a hostile work environment caused by a non-immediate supervisor or co-worker, (5) Tesla committed a civil rights violation in a contractual relationship, (6) Tesla failed to take all reasonable steps necessary to prevent Diaz from being subject to racial harassment, and (7) Tesla negligently supervised or negligently continued to employ Ramon Martinez and that action harmed Diaz. ...
> The weight of the evidence is against Tesla's minimization of Diaz's emotional and psychological harm. Diaz testified about the severe consequences he experienced during his time at the factory. See supra Background, Section II.E. Jones similarly testified about the effects on her father. Id. And his psychological expert confirmed all of this, including by performing psychological evaluations to determine whether Diaz was “overreporting” his symptoms. Id. The jury, in short, had ample basis to believe Diaz's testimony that he was severely emotionally harmed.
Given that two different jury trials found Diaz's claims valid, what should the law be to prevent this level of hostile workplace environment?
If $3 million in punitive damages too large, and you think it a smaller one is more reasonable, how much is enough to deter Telsa from having a hostile work environment in the future?
Lousy lawyers - ianal, Musk said they were not allowed to present new evidence. No idea what was going on. Certainly there are judgements in the US legal system that seem wrong. It is not a perfect system.
About half a century ago, after some difficult (and in some cases bloody) fights, the United States passed several laws curtailing some liberties a company owner may take with how they run their affairs with the aim of a net societal good. They are pretty well-constrained, place little burden on companies overall, and have the net effect of allowing a double-digit-percentage of working Americans of having a fair shot at doing the work they must do every day to make wage free of a kind of psychological torment that their peers are never at risk of experiencing daily.
It was certainly a curtailment of freedom of speech and expression. It was a curtailment of such with significant positive outcomes and made the country a better place.
Nothing I've seen about the way we are today suggests to me that rolling back the clock on those laws would be a net good.
...And you will be fought every step of the way, as the people who got the laws first passed were fought every step of the way. Of course, I hope you fail, as I've never heard an explanation of how repealing those laws would improve things.
More freedom also means more potential businesses who have to compete for workers, which is good for the workers. If businesses have to compete, they'll try to make things as nice as possible for the workers.
The argument that things would become what they "were before" doesn't make that much sense. In a poor economy, things are poorly, no matter what socialist laws try to prevent it (worker protection only helps you if you have a job, for example). There is no reason that by abandoning some law from the 50 years ago, the economy would fall back to the state of the 80ies. Also maybe the 80ies weren't actually so bad. I'm too lazy to look it up, but I keep hearing that in the old days, people could afford to buy houses and feed a family on a single salary.
I'm sure you can get better explanations and economic theories. You have never heard an explanation because you have never looked for it or listened to one, not because none exist.
Or do you also respect the freedom of employees to engage in collective bargaining, the freedom of employees to negotiate a closed shop with the company, the freedom to engage in solidarity and political strikes, the freedom to carry out secondary boycotts, and so on.
Most of those are prohibited by law, where 100 years ago they were legal. And they didn't require a special law to enable those powers, because they grew out of the right to quit one's job.
> If businesses have to compete, they'll try to make things as nice as possible for the workers.
Which is why businesses don't like to compete, and will form cartels and informal agreements to prevent competition.
> I'm too lazy to look it up, but I keep hearing that in the old days, people could afford to buy houses and feed a family on a single salary.
We also had a lot higher tax rate on the wealth. And stronger union power. If you're going to lazily cherry pick history, then there are a lot of cherries to pick from.
Everybody can start a company - or should be allowed to, that is the point. Socialist rules making it difficult prevent people from becoming independent.
> Or do you also respect the freedom of employees to engage in collective bargaining, the freedom of employees to negotiate a closed shop with the company, the freedom to engage in solidarity and political strikes, the freedom to carry out secondary boycotts, and so on.
People should be free to do that, but "employers" should also be free to fire them if they do.
> Which is why businesses don't like to compete, and will form cartels and informal agreements to prevent competition.
That works by government intervention and freedom would prevent it.
> We also had a lot higher tax rate on the wealth. And stronger union power. If you're going to lazily cherry pick history, then there are a lot of cherries to pick from.
I am not the person who claimed things were so bad in the past that we must not go back.
I recommend if you don't like the rules and are too lazy (as you've self-described) to do the hard work to change them, you should consider changing countries. After all, your remedy for employees who don't like working for employers who break the Equal Employment Act is they should change companies.
If that solution seems unpalatable, meditate upon why it is inappropriate to suggest that employees who don't like being discriminated against should just use the remedy of changing employers.
What socialist like you keep forgetting is that somebody has to provide the jobs that you claim the rights to. If nobody provides the jobs, you can make laws all you want, people still won't have jobs.
It turns out there are a couple motivating factors for why people form companies, including:
1. There's something they want to do and they need a lot of people to do it
2. They want to make a lot of money
3. They want to set their own work conditions
Socialist policies don't really impact motivation 1 (in fact, they can enhance it; one way American firms are hamstrung relative to their international peers is they have to pay directly for healthcare for their employees, whereas other countries treat that as a national-level responsibility that doesn't come asymmetrically out of various firms' pocketbooks). And motivation 2 is still satisfied if they're making $10 million instead of $10 billion, so long as $10 million is the number you're making when you're "winning the game." Motivation 3 is still very much a liberty that every company owner has, with only a few curtailments (not really any more than the notion that my driver's license gives me liberty to drive on public roads, even though I'm not allowed to drive on the left side of a divided road directly into oncoming traffic).
People have been predicting "socialism will kill the desire to make work for people" for decades as myriad nations have developed stronger government support for citizens' needs, and it hasn't happened. Sooner or later, one has to accept the evidence is against the "socialism kills jobs" hypothesis.
The US has more socialist policies in place right now than ever before, and unemployment is under 4%.
I don't know the extent of socialism in the US, but it certainly isn't a socialist country yet. Yes, we have run the experiment in the past, and all socialist countries failed spectacularly.
There is no such thing as free health care. Whether companies pay directly or via taxes doesn't really make a difference. The system in the US seems weird in various ways. All the "free health care" systems in other countries seem to be struggling a lot, by the way. None of them is really a proven solution as of now.
Great, if they don't need lots of people the Equal Employment Act shouldn't be a problem for them. There's a minimum size on enforcement of the law.
I really think you're overestimating how difficult it is to avoid creating a hostile work environment. You just follow up on reports. That's what you do. There's a whole standardized process to it and every company does it. The fact that Tesla failed to follow it (and failed so hard a jury originally awarded over $100 million in punitive damages, a number speaking to their outrage and disgust at what was allowed to occur) makes Tesla an outlier here.
Point blank: do you think the goal it is trying to achieve is correct but the method is flawed, or do you think the goal (changing, by law, the environment so that an entire demographic of Americans have any hope of having a job without harassment based on unchangeable characteristics they have) is wrong?
And then you simply fire the non-liberals involved? Hostile work environment is usually people not getting along. I don't think that is usually easy to solve. You probably have some bias thinking about racists and what not. But even if you just choose to believe all liberal complaints, that enables people to exploit the system. An example would be female execs who seem to always file for "sexism" when they are fired, because why not.
> Point blank: do you think the goal it is trying to achieve is correct but the method is flawed, or do you think the goal (changing, by law, the environment so that an entire demographic of Americans have any hope of having a job without harassment based on unchangeable characteristics they have) is wrong?
I think nobody should be forced to employ somebody they don't want to employ (with their own money - for tax payer money, different rules are necessary). And I don't trust governments to know better how to run companies than the people owning the companies.
This is an odd sentiment and I don't know what to make of it. I'm assuming you don't think only non-liberals can create a hostile work environment, so what do you mean?
> I think nobody should be forced to employ somebody they don't want to employ (with their own money - for tax payer money, different rules are necessary).
As you've mentioned you don't live in the United states, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you don't know our terrible history with racism. The short version is that we had to pass laws after trying myriad other things because, as a principle of a nation where all men are created equal, it was unacceptable that there were entire regions of the country where one simply could not maintain employment if one had the wrong skin color.
It was an ugly fight. They shut down public education in some places during the fight. In some places blood was drawn during the fight.
But in the end, we the people said no.
And that declaration of "no" is tied to a privilege, not a right: the privilege to own a company, which is a legal construct licensed by the government. No one is owed the right to be a company owner, and if one wants to own a company, there are societal obligations they shoulder. Obeying the Equal Rights Act and the Equal Employment Act are such obligations (again, once the company is big enough!), right alongside "obey zoning laws" and "don't dump toxic waste in a river."
It is fundamentally naive to believe this is a problem the market will solve, because this country already tried solving it with the market.
You claimed it would be easy to create non-toxic workspaces. So I assume you think you only have to fire the non-liberal people. How else do you imagine things to go down? It is also usually the liberals who complain loudly about allegeddly toxic workplaces (while somehow never creating any workplaces themselves - why are all business owners evil, when there seem to be so many good people around?).
Racism - yes I know you had all sorts of struggles. But I think you are lying when you claim black people could not hold jobs. In the beginning, black people were deported to the US to work. Also I don't think racism is at the core of your country, that is just the modern "Critical Race Theory" bullshit. It is not built around racism. People would rather be left alone.
Here is how you are REALLY wrong, though:
> No one is owed the right to be a company owner
Exactly the opposite: everybody should have that right. That means freedom. Nobody is owed a job, though - who should be obligated to provide that job?
If everybody can be a company owner, so can black people. Are you sure even black company owners would discriminate against black employees? There are many places with predominantly black population in the US, are there really no black owned businesses there?
And you know bloody well that most companies and organisations discriminate in favor of black people these days. You are really overly dramatic in your retelling of the story of racism. The sad thing is that in that way, the real issues are also not being addressed.
> because this country already tried solving it with the market.
I'm sure you misrepresent the actual history very badly here. "The market" would allow black people and also liberals who only love people to create companies and create all the non-toxic work environments they can dream of.
What would be stopping them? Would EVERY bank deny them a credit? Even good people like you, who want to help black people. Aren't there hundreds of millions like you - what would stop you from giving money to black businesses (for example via Kickstarter)?
We're done here. You do not know sufficient history to make this conversation worth my time. I can't bridge the gap if we're not working from the same collection of facts, sorry.
> What would be stopping them? Would EVERY bank deny them a credit?
Yes. That's literally what happened. Entire towns and states that would loan zero money to a black person. And we have no evidence that but for the law we wouldn't go right back to that.
I wonder what your sources are? For sure black people were able to work throughout history.
> Yes. That's literally what happened. Entire towns and states that would loan zero money to a black person. And we have no evidence that but for the law we wouldn't go right back to that.
Towns and states are not in the business of giving out loans, and nobody is entitled to a loan. But good people like you would have been able to give loans to black people. I don't think your idea of history is accurate at all.
A pretty decent public school education. I'm not going to be able to quote you sources because I didn't write down cites for four years of high school. But like I said, not working from the same collection of facts. I wonder what your sources are, because you're pretty off-the-bead from the commonly-taught knowledge of US history in the US (and seem to be basing a lot of beliefs about how America should run its affairs on that information).
Black people were, obviously, able to work. Sharecropping came in right after slavery left. We're not talking about work in general; we're talking about work in a corporate environment. American firms mostly simply did not hire black people until the law forced them to (especially to skilled-labor jobs). And the evidence that this restriction was primarily based on racial prejudice is overwhelming.
> nobody is entitled to a loan
Hey, you're right! Although as of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, borrowers are entitled to have their skin color ignored when they request a loan.
In addition, nobody is entitled to own a business. They can certainly work for themselves (being a contractor is a thing, gig economy is a thing, short-term work is a thing), but the privilege of incorporating, of creating the legal fiction of a "company," of having one's personal assets and fortunes divorced from the errors and risks of one's corporation... That's a privilege that carries several societal obligations. Nobody is owed that legal protection, especially if they aren't interested in abiding by the law of the land.
I'm operating under the assumption that you don't have an issue with the notion that being a company owner requires one to be responsible for tax law compliance, or EPA toxic-waste compliance, or securities / exchange reporting compliance. Is there something special about equal opportunity compliance that you take issue with? If not, suffice to know the government's right to impose it extends from the same right that imposes EPA law and tax law.
Even if that was the case, which I don't think was universally true, either, it doesn't mean companies should be forced to hire people based on race. It seems more likely black people simply took a longer time to work their way up, as a lot of them started from a "lower" starting point in terms of education and resources.
You shouldn't trust your school education too much, btw. It is obvious that many schools and teachers also push an agenda.
In any case, there were laws mandating segregation (admittedly I only just learned that those Jim Crow laws were actually only in place in the South), which were eventually abandoned. Blaming free markets for that seems completely misguided.
And why do you think of companies as white run businesses that would discriminate against black people? For sure there were also black run businesses, or they gradually emerged once they became legal.
Even today we see a lot of businesses who are racist against white people, and businesses that advertise with being "black owned" - so discrimination based on skin color still seems to be pretty normal and accepted.
> Hey, you're right! Although as of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, borrowers are entitled to have their skin color ignored when they request a loan.
How would that even work? It's a bullshit law that leads to bullshit lawsuits, would be my expectation. And probably also to loans that should not have been handed out, because people fear the lawsuits.
And no, owning a business does not make you exempt from the law. But laws are debatable. Pouring toxic waste into the environment impacts other people. Your hiring decisions do not. It is not nearly in the same category of regulations. People should not be forced to hire people they don't want to hire, period. If you don't like some hiring decisions, you are free to start your own business and hire the people that you think should be hired.
This is the crux of our disagreement. I can say nothing to this other than you are wrong and have failed to grasp American history and the effects of the law of averages.
It certainly has nothing to do with American history. It is a fundamental principle.
Meanwhile, the ERA and EEA have basically everything to do with American history. We tried letting people self-organize into not being racist and misogynistic (and later, homophobic). They did not. And because denying people an opportunity to work or own property or start a business based on race (or, for that matter, gender or sexual orientation) is counter to the principles of equality America pursues, we tied the right to own a corporation to respecting those principles. America has never recognized a "right to incorporate," or a "right to be one's own boss;" it's neither enshrined in the Constitution nor mentioned in the Declaration of Independence (you could loosely lump it under "pursue happiness," but there's plenty of things in that category that aren't fundamental rights, so it' a weak justification at best).
(Law of averages: there were outlier cases of local areas where black people experienced more equitable treatment. Tulsa Oklahoma, until the white folk in town burned down the black businesses. But on average, black people could expect to be treated worse than white people in business opportunities, discriminated against taking out loans to start their own companies, and discriminated against in employment. For answers to "Why didn't they just form their own businesses / fix the situation amongst themselves," besides the notion of 'separate but equal' proving completely unworkable after several generations of trying it, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre for examples of what happened when black folks tried to self-organize to get ahead.
In short: we outlawed all that crap for a reason... A long, bloody, mutliple-generations-tried-private-solutions-it-didn't-work reason).
Other countries have different histories of racism (or misogyny or homophobia) so arrived at different conclusions. The law is path-dependent.
(TBH, you seem pretty hung up on what my country does in this regard for someone who isn't even beholden to these laws).
Right to be one's own boss: it is called freedom. It doesn't have to be written in the constitution with those exact words. I don't think the US is a socialist country just yet.
And your narrative of letting people self-organize seems wrong. There were laws mandating segregation. That is not self-organization, but government interference.
Obviously murdering people and burning down businesses is and should be illegal.
Why?
> Right to be one's own boss: it is called freedom.
That has never been any kind of guaranteed right. And, I cannot stress this enough, you can do that and be compliant with all of these laws if you just work for yourself and don't have many employees. Most of these laws don't even kick in for firms under a certain size.
> There were laws mandating segregation.
So once those laws were rendered unenforceable, why do you think they then needed an Equal Rights Act in addition? Check the history.
> Obviously murdering people and burning down businesses is and should be illegal.
Of course, and it was, but if the law is unenforced it might as well not be.
That's why the federal government stepped in, because the states were not protecting the rights of citizens.
Freedom to what, in this context?
> If businesses have to compete, they'll try to make things as nice as possible for the workers.
This is the "capitalism will solve it" argument which proved so untrue we passed the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Employment Act. It turns out that, no, even when it's economically obvious that catering to a minority population would be valuable, you can have 100% of a town refusing to do so because racism is more important to them than money. That creates entire regions of the country that are no-go zones if your skin color is wrong, and we decided that's not acceptable.
> There is no reason that by abandoning some law from the 50 years ago, the economy would fall back to the state of the 80ies.
I'm not concerned about what the economy would do; I'm concerned about whether it would be harder to keep a job free of daily torment if you're the wrong skin color than it is now. My mistake; the law in question isn't 50 years old, it's a 1970s law.
> I'm too lazy to look it up, but I keep hearing that in the old days, people could afford to buy houses and feed a family on a single salary.
If you can find some evidence that the passage of the ERA modified that, feel free to present it. But I'm pretty sure to explain why that changed, you're looking for Reagan-era deregulation (and the economic shift from a manufacturing economy, where unions were strong, to a service economy, where few unions existed).
> You have never heard an explanation because you have never looked for it or listened to one, not because none exist.
Interesting and unsupported hypothesis. But I don't expect you to bring me anything new because you've already declared you're "too lazy to look it up," so I think this conversation thread has ended.
The freedom to work in the way they want. To escape the hamster wheel, for example by starting their own company with the conditions they prefer.
> This is the "capitalism will solve it" argument which proved so untrue we passed the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Employment Act.
It didn't prove untrue. The early days of capitalism where marked by a previous population explosion and abandonment of the feudal system, with lots of people pouring into cities looking for work. That is why there was a lot of poverty.
> That creates entire regions of the country that are no-go zones if your skin color is wrong, and we decided that's not acceptable.
Pretty sure there are lots of No-Go zones for people with the wrong skin color today. At least if your skin color is white.
> I'm concerned about whether it would be harder to keep a job free of daily torment if you're the wrong skin color than it is now.
So you think there wouldn't be any businesses run by black owners? Why not?
> But I'm pretty sure to explain why that changed, you're looking for Reagan-era deregulation
So the economy was better in the past, but your argument was that it was worse?
> Interesting and unsupported hypothesis.
Well everybody who HAS heard explanations knows they exist, so the reason you have not heard of them must be that you wilfully denied their exoistence.
Regardless, your race doesn't define you, your experiences do. Your experiences will vary as a black woman in Jamacia, the US, Russia and Egypt. Implying this person is "systemically opressed" is questionable at best.
Yes, nuking things from the orbit does have downsides, if you ask me. But if this imperfect tool is something that reliably prevents a new crop of Jim Crow laws, I can tolerate some fallout. (If you think that people are now "civilized by default", and "it can't possibly happen again", look at the Texas abortion law, for instance.)
'Failing to provide a work environment free of racial harassment is a form of discrimination' see https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/section-15-race-and-color...
Similar to unsafe work places, such as if an accident occurs at work then the business can be held responsible for not caring about safety.
"So, tell us more about how you had to lose $15 million because you can't be bothered to keep your workplace from turning into a Klan-friendly zone? Any plans to prevent that in the future?"
It was because Tesla broke long-established employment law by supporting a hostile work environment.
Nearly all of the amount is due to punitive damages - $175,000 in damages for emotional distress and $3 million in punitive damages. That's meant to punish Tesla for unlawful activity and deter them from doing so again. (In the original trial it was $6.9 million in compensatory damages and $130 million in punitive damages. That's the amount that then got knocked down to a $15M offer.)
(Two other options to deter this behavior are strong government oversight, and strong unions, but the US has decided to go the court-based punitive damage route instead.)
Scrawled swastikas on the wall are hardly characterized as "some words and a drawing." And Tesla management's lack of activity is part of the problem.
Tesla’s role is to provide a safe workplace. Failure to do so deserves penalty.
This is not hard to grok: worker safety is more important than the corp.
Safety includes all aspects. Including mental health.
I'm thinking if I were a company, I'd be pretty keen on replacing humans with AI as soon as possible.
Which is to say little. That would be true whether discrimination law existed or not!
Large settlements are good because otherwise there is no incentive for companies to prevent that behavior. The main point of laws and their enforcement is to deter that behavior in the first place, and small settlements do not achieve deterrence.