A federal jury in San Francisco on Monday ordered Tesla to pay about $3.2 million to a black man who accused the automaker of ignoring racial abuse he faced while working at its California factory.
The award was far less than the $137 million a different jury awarded two years ago, mostly in punitive damages. The judge in that trial later reduced the amount to $15 million, prompting the plaintiff, Owen Diaz, to challenge the amount in a new trial.
But instead of more money, you 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 had been the target of repeated racist offenses while working as a contractor at Tesla’s Fremont factory, near San Francisco, in 2015 and 2016. While there, he said, a supervisor and other colleagues regularly used racial slurs, including in reference to him. Employees also wrote racial epithets and drew symbols and cartoons around the factory, he said.
Mr. Diaz said the offenses had affected him emotionally and brought them to the company’s attention, but Tesla had done little to address them. He said he had tolerated the hostilities until his son started working at the factory and faced similar treatment.
“The prevalence of the use of the N-word within the Tesla workplace is an indication that they didn’t care how their African-American employees felt,” Bernard Alexander, one of Diaz’s attorneys, said in closing arguments last week. rehearsal. “He was a complete affront to all African Americans within the workplace.”
Tesla’s lawyers suggested that Mr. Diaz had exaggerated the impact and scope of the racial harassment he had faced, encouraging the jury to minimize the damage award.
But the company’s responsibility for subjecting Mr. Diaz to a hostile work environment and failing to prevent racial harassment was not on trial. That had already been “conclusively determined,” Judge William H. Orrick said in instructions provided to jurors. Instead, the jury’s responsibility was to determine how much was owed to Mr. Diaz.
Judge Orrick also presided over the original trial.
After the 2021 trial, Tesla’s human resources chief said the company had 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 come a long way since then.
