Zoom / Cars parked at the Tesla Fremont factory in Fremont, California, on February 10, 2022.
Getty Images | Josh Edelson
On Wednesday, a federal judge dismissed Tesla’s claim that it was not responsible for “embarrassing” racist abuse by a former factory worker. U.S. District Judge William Orick dismissed what he called “Tesla’s diluted revisionism,” which described plaintiff Owen Diaz’s suffering as “mild and short-lived.”
However, the judge reduced Diaz’s financial reward. While the jury awarded Diaz $ 6.9 million in damages and $ 130 million in damages, Orik set the amount at $ 1.5 million in damages and $ 13.5 million in damages. He wrote that the new $ 1.5 million in compensation is “the highest reward supported by evidence” and that criminal compensation could be nine times higher under US law.
“The evidence was disturbing,” Orik said in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. “The jury heard that Tesla’s factory was full of racism. Diaz faces frequent racial abuses, including n-words and other insults. Other officials harassed him. Its executives and Tesla’s broader management structure reacted little or nothing. And supervisors even joined the abuse, one of which threatened Diaz and drew a racist cartoon near his workplace. “
Tesla wanted to limit compensatory and punitive damages to $ 300,000 each. Advertising
“Sufficient legal basis to hold Tesla liable”
Diaz has worked at Tesla’s Fremont plant since June 2015 and was “separated” from Tesla without prior notice in May 2016, the ruling said. Diaz’s salary came from a staffing agency called CitiStaff, but he testified that “everyone [his] The instructions come from Tesla. “He received training and certification from Tesla for his work with a forklift. He sued Tesla in October 2017.
After the trial, Tesla asked the court “for a verdict of law that he is not responsible” or alternatively “for a new trial and to reduce the amount of damages,” Orik said. Tesla claims that under 42 USC § 1981 – a law from the era of reconstruction that prohibits discrimination in the drafting and execution of contracts – it is not liable because “Diaz’s employment contract is with a staffing agency with which Tesla has contracted “Not with Tesla itself,” Orik wrote.
Orik rejected the request for a verdict as a legal issue, writing:
[T]the jury had sufficient legal grounds to declare Tesla liable on two grounds. First, a special verdict found that Tesla qualified as Diaz’s employer under the law, not even on paper. He could reasonably have established that this employment relationship was governed by an implied contract. Second, Diaz could be found to be the beneficiary of the contract between Tesla and the recruitment agency. As a result, Diaz was entitled to bring an action under Section 1981 in order to defend his rights under that contract. In other matters, Tesla has waived its legal challenge to Diaz’s negligence oversight claim. And Tesla’s proposal for a new process was also rejected; the weight of the evidence largely supports the jury’s conclusions on accountability.
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