The punishment is severe, the allegations are not new: an ex-Tesla employee has fought for $130 million in damages in a US court. The company failed to take action against racial hostility in the workplace.
It is well known that the US legal system generates high sums of damages. Now Tesla has been ordered by a court ruling to transfer over $130 million to an ex-employee. As the Wall Street Journal writes in its report, the jury considered it proven that the company had exposed the 53-year-old man to a “racially motivated work environment” and did not take adequate countermeasures.
According to the report, the employee was employed at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, from 2015 to 2016, for a total of 9 months, and was entrusted with the operation of elevators – so he was not a skilled worker in vehicle production. As the lawyers described in the course of the process, their client had to endure during this time, among other things, that other employees gave him “racist epithets”. In addition, “graffiti and writings with racist content” are said to have found widespread use in the sanitary facilities and other work areas of the factory.
In a blog post on the judgment, Valerie Capers Workman, manager in HR at Tesla, tried to categorize the plaintiff coldly, referring to contract law, employment relationships, and other technical details and tried to question the plaintiff’s motives. It is true that other witnesses had also confirmed that they had “regularly heard racist insults (including the N-word)”. In surveys, however, they agreed that the language, in their opinion, was mostly “friendly” and usually used by Afro-American colleagues.
Last but not least, Tesla only has to acknowledge that the jury, after considering the facts, comes to a significantly different verdict than the company itself. And so the manager who is jointly responsible also manages to find a few words to confirm complicity At least remember, “We acknowledge that we were not perfect in 2015 and 2016. We are still not perfect. But we have come a long way in the last 5 years,” said Workman.
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