Good afternoon. Let's get to it!
So, Tesla's been ordered by a San Francisco federal court to pay $136.9 million for a racist and toxic work environment.
Here's a tweet for more clarification.
Tesla could have avoided this. There's no excusing what happened. No human being should ever have to tolerate racist abuse. No human being should ever have to be silent when he or she is being targeted for racist harassment and abuse.
Tesla could have enforced its EEOC policies.
It didn't.
It put profits over people.
In an excerpt from the Root, here's what went down at Tesla.
Owen Diaz, a former Black employee who accused Tesla of ignoring racial abuse he experienced while working at the company, is in for a payday. A jury ordered the electric car firm to pay him $137 million for the abuse he endured.
It took the jury four hours to agree with Diaz that Tesla had created a hostile work environment because they failed to address the racism he experienced, according to his lawyer. Most of the award—$130 million—was punitive damages for the company. The remaining $7 million was for the emotional distress Diaz suffered, according to the New York Times.
“It’s a great thing when one of the richest corporations in America has to have a reckoning of the abhorrent conditions at its factory for Black people,” Lawrence Organ, Diaz’s lawyer said late on Monday.
Here's another tweet about Tesla's "corporate" culture.
Here's an excerpt from CNBC.com.
Diaz, a former contract worker who was hired at Elon Musk's electric vehicle company through a staffing agency in 2015, 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.
Here's an excerpt from the very same article from CNBC.com about a Tesla spokesperson "spinning" its way out of responsibility.
However, the company issued a blog post late Monday to the general public, which it said had been distributed internally to employees earlier by Tesla VP of People Valerie Capers Workman. In the post, she downplayed the severity of the racist discrimination Diaz described.
For example, Workman's letter 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."
Since when were racist slurs and racist graffiti "friendly"?
Tesla has been profitable; it's been problematic for women and minorities.
Here's why it's been problematic.
Tesla uses mandatory arbitration to compel employees to resolve disputes behind closed doors rather than in a public trial.
Like other companies that use mandatory arbitration, Tesla rarely faces significant damages or takes deep corrective actions after arbitrators settle a dispute. However, Tesla was required to pay $1 million — as the result of an arbitration agreement — to another former worker, Melvin Berry, who also endured a racist, hostile workplace at Tesla.
That part I emboldened signifies the problem; it would rather pay to make it go away instead of doing real diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.
It doesn't take making a safe working environment seriously.
Here's a question for Elon Musk the press needs to ask:
When will Tesla take racism seriously?
And here's another one:
What will accountability look like in Tesla?
Thank you for reading.