Díaz Owen (Owen Diaz)

Díaz Owen (Owen Diaz)

Biography

2021: Compensation of $137 million from Tesla

On October 4, 2021, a federal jury in San Francisco ordered Tesla to pay almost $137 million to black elevator Owen Diaz, who accused the Tesla automaker of ignoring the racial slurs he had to face while working at the plant.

The plaintiff stated that he worked at a plant in Fremont, California, for about a year - in 2015 and 2016. There, according to him, the head and other colleagues repeatedly addressed him using racial insults. He spoke about his experience in an article published in 2018 in The New York Times magazine.

In an interview on October 4, 2021, Diaz said he was relieved by the jury's verdict on the same day. According to him, the employees painted swastikas, scratched racial epithets in the toilet cabin and left drawings throughout the factory with humiliating caricatures of black children. According to him, despite repeated complaints, Tesla did little to eliminate such behavior. The results of bullying at work were sleepless nights, weight loss and appetite.

The jury agreed with Diaz's claim that Tesla created a hostile work environment without solving the problem of racism that he faced. The vast majority of the sentence, $130 million, amounted to penalties against the company. The rest, $6.9 million, was intended to compensate for Diaz's past and future non-economic losses.

In addition to Diaz, three other witnesses testified in court that they regularly heard racial abuse, including the word "negro," at a factory in Fremont. Although they all agreed that the use of the word is not appropriate in the workplace, they also agreed that in most cases, in their opinion, this language was used in a friendly manner and usually by African-American colleagues, "said Valerie Capers Workman, head of human resources at Tesla.

In an appeal to Tesla employees, published on the company's website. The company writes that it responded to Diaz's complaints by dismissing two contractors and removing another. Tesla does not believe that the sentence is fair, but admits that communication between employees within the company was not ideal in 2015 and 2016.^[1]

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