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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
" the case was only able to move forward because Diaz had not signed one of Tesla’s mandatory arbitration agreements which the company uses to force employees to resolve disputes without a public trial"
I think this is something very US-specific that is it legal to have an agreement that someone gives up basic citizen right like going to court and the right to have a public trial.
In most countries something like this is just an abusive clause in the contract and is invalid automatically.
At least in EU, we try to have laws to prevent things. In US there are less such laws, but you are able to sue for huge amounts of money. Kind of like "ask permission" vs "ask forgiveness".
At least that is how I see it, so correct me if I'm totally off here.
edit: we can switch roles if you prefer
Tesla's case was tad more serious than one employee shouting random racist remarks at another employee.
The article mentions a long pattern of racism to the point it became a part of the company's culture, a few former employees who complained about the systemic problem, a company-enforced arbitration process that systematically brushed complains under the rug as standard operating procedure, and a problem so widespread that a shareholder felt compelled to raise the issue in the company's annual shareholder meeting.
Quoted from the article:
> Institutional Shareholder Services, the proxy advisory firm, recommended shareholders vote for Nia’s proposal, noting that Tesla has faced many serious allegations of sexual and racial harassment and discrimination over the years.
How do you even prove such a thing? Especially 5 years after you have left the place. And how does it not become a case of he said, she said?
>“In addition to Mr. Diaz, three other witnesses (all non-Tesla contract employees) testified at trial that they regularly heard racial slurs (including the n-word) on the Fremont factory floor. While they all agreed that the use of the n-word was not appropriate in the workplace, they also agreed that most of the time they thought the language was used in a ‘friendly’ manner and usually by African-American colleagues.”
Only a fraction of that money should be awarded to the victim. The rest could as well go to charity, or our public health system, etc.
The risk of frivolous litigation does not even register as a problem. The amount a company pays in damages is a factor of the corporation's size, and a consequence of what it takes to actually make them fix a systemic problem so that no one has to live with it.
Otherwise, corporations could foster extremely toxic work environment and company cultures and any consequence would be written off as an operational cost.
Also, mega corporations like Tesla do have their own dedicated HR and legal departments, so I'm sure they can handle an occasional court case.
"The rest could as well go to charity, or our public health system".
What's a single person going to do with $100M.
It would have been enough for a bunch of schools
Which is a bit ironic considering Musk himself was born in South Africa.
Imagine if some middle manager at the Toyota plant in Indiana was racist towards an Asian American shift worker, telling them to "go back to Japan!" It's that level of unimaginable stupidity. While I don't question the veracity of the claims, it's genuinely difficult for me to believe that that kind of cartoonish racism still exists, especially in California.
Would Tesla be open to lawsuits if they fired African-American colleagues who used racial slurs (including the n- word) in a "friendly" manner?
From the article:
“In addition to Mr. Diaz, three other witnesses (all non-Tesla contract employees) testified at trial that they regularly heard racial slurs (including the n-word) on the Fremont factory floor. While they all agreed that the use of the n-word was not appropriate in the workplace, they also agreed that most of the time they thought the language was used in a ‘friendly’ manner and usually by African-American colleagues.”
It's hard to really judge the context from here; none of us were there, and I didn't read the full court report either (as most of us haven't). In another article Diaz said "some days I would just sit on my stairs and cry" so I'm gonna guess the context wasn't particularly friendly.
It's still possible that there was a mismatch in how it was intended: the offenders intended it in a friendly way, but that's not how it was taken. It can happen to the best of us sometimes. One mistake is one mistake and can happen, but to be honest you need to be pretty darn tone-deaf to not notice that someone is uncomfortable from someone's response in both verbal and non-verbal clues, or a bit of an asshole to choose to ignore this.
All in all, based on the reporting I find the "it was intended in a friendly manner" rather unconvincing, even when we give people the benefit of the doubt. Was it truly "racist"? I don't know; I'll withhold that judgement. But at the very least it strikes me as insensitive and unkind.
- Mr. Diaz never worked for Tesla. He was a contract employee who worked for Citistaff.
- Mr. Diaz worked as an elevator operator at the Fremont factory for nine months, from June 2015 to March 2016.
- In addition to Mr. Diaz, three other witnesses (all non-Tesla contract employees) testified at trial that they regularly heard racial slurs (including the n-word) on the Fremont factory floor. While they all agreed that the use of the n-word was not appropriate in the workplace, they also agreed that most of the time they thought the language was used in a “friendly” manner and usually by African-American colleagues. They also told the jury about racist graffiti in the bathrooms, which was removed by our janitorial staff;
- There was no witness testimony or other evidence that anyone ever heard the n-word used toward Mr. Diaz.
- Mr. Diaz made written complaints to his non-Tesla supervisors. Those were well-documented in the nine months he worked at our factory. But he didn’t make any complaints about the n-word until after he was not hired full-time by Tesla – and after he hired an attorney.
- The three times that Mr. Diaz did complain about harassment, Tesla stepped in and made sure responsive and timely action was taken by the staffing agencies: two contractors were fired and one was suspended (who had drawn a racially offensive cartoon). Mr. Diaz himself testified that he was “very satisfied” with the results of one of the investigations, and he agreed that there was follow-up on each of his complaints.
- Even though Mr. Diaz now complains about racial harassment at Fremont, at the time he said he was being harassed, he recommended to his son and daughter – while they were all living together in the same home – that they work at Tesla with him.
> an arbitrator hired by Tesla to resolve the case in a series of closed-door hearings agreed the slurs weren't racist. Rather, they were "consistent with lyrics and images commonly found in rap songs and freestyle rap competitions," retired Marin County Judge Lynn Duryee wrote in a decision reviewed by Protocol. In a footnote, Duryee cited lyrics on genius.com for a song by Insanity, a little-known Canadian rapper.
Sadly, his victory will no doubt lead to fewer low paid roles in big firms as CEOs will not like it that even the littlest man or woman can hold behemoths to account: a big motivator for automation.
Personally, if i found my working conditions inadequate, i'd just leave and look for different opportunities because to a relatively low paid people like myself getting on any sort of a blacklist or getting negative publicity would be career ending, i probably could not afford court expenses or the mental toll something like that would take, and just generally am not a person who'd want to sue others and stir trouble (like many people, i'd assume), but what other reasons are there for people to look at employment and lawsuits as an unethical "get rich quick" scheme?
Disclaimer: don't assume that i condone any of the above or would like to see a world in which abusive behaviour cannot rightfully be settled in court. However, I'm curious about the mechanisms in place to prevent the exploitation of the court system. This is especially relevant because of patent trolling and insurance fraud in certain countries.
