For Owen Diaz, justice has eventually been served as a federal jury in San Francisco has ordered Tesla Inc. to pay nearly $137 million to the black former employee who won a ruling that the company failed to stop his supervisors from calling him the “N-word” at the electric-car maker’s northern California plant.
In its report, the jury said the company neglected to take reasonable steps to prevent Owen Diaz, a lift operator hired in 2015 through a staffing agency, from being racially harassed.
It was reported that Diaz’s case marked a rare instance in which Tesla, which typically uses mandatory arbitration to resolve employee disputes, had to defend itself in a public trial. Records have it that the company almost never loses workplace arbitrations, though it was hit with a $1 million award in May in a case brought by another ex-worker that was similar to Diaz’s.
Owen Diaz in his lawsuit had described the Fremont, California, plant, as a ‘hotbed of racist behavior’ where he was subjected to daily racist abuse including the N-word, over a course of 11 months from 2015 to 2016.
But Tesla argued that it never intended to disregard the rights and safety of African-American workers placed by the staffing agency and that all incidents reported by Diaz were investigated and resolved.
Tesla’s attorney, Tracey Kennedy said “Mr. Diaz’s story simply doesn’t make sense” in light of his encouragement to his son and daughter to take up jobs at the company. She also said Diaz’s claims weren’t supported by the evidence.
However, the 52-year-old maintained that fellow employees drew swastikas and left racist graffiti around the plant, while he said one of his supervisors drew a person with a black face and a bone in his hair and wrote ‘booo,’ short for ‘jigaboo.’ The supervisor then allegedly told him ‘he couldn’t take a joke’ when Diaz confronted him. Diaz contended that none of his supervisors stepped in to stop the abuse.
It was gathered that J. Bernard Alexander III, a lawyer for Diaz, told jurors that “as opposed to a zero-tolerance policy, Tesla had a zero-responsibility policy.”
Alexander said the “n-word” was “pervasive and virtually everywhere”. Diaz himself testified that be suffered “sleepless nights” and weight loss as he lost his appetite.
“Some days I would just sit on my stairs and cry,” he told the jury.
The jury’s award included $6.9 million for emotional distress and $130 million in punitive damages, according to Diaz’s other attorney, Lawrence A. Organ.
