Jury orders Tesla to pay $3 million in race-related work case

Tesla is on the line for $3 million to a Black former contractor in a race-related work case that has been ongoing for years.

According to NBC News, a San Francisco federal jury ordered the automaker to pay $3 million in punitive damages and $175,000 in economic damages to Owen Diaz, an elevator operator at its Fremont, California, location in 2015 and 2016.

In 2021, Diaz was awarded $137 million, an amount that included punitive damages, after a jury found that Tesla violated his civil rights and did not take all necessary measures to stop and prevent racist harassment directed at him.

In an aerial view from last October, new cars sit in a parking lot at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California. A judge has ordered the company to pay $3 million in punitive damages to Owen Diaz, who was a Black contractor at the location in 2015 and 2016. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Judge William H. Orrick reduced the sum to $15 million, prompting Diaz and Tesla to request a new trial to determine damages.

Last week, the former contractor testified in court again about how his coworkers at Tesla used racist slurs to disparage him and other Black employees, made him feel physically unsafe, urged him to “go back to Africa” and left racist graffiti and a racist drawing around.

The crude drawing left at his workspace resembled Inki the Caveman, a widely criticized racist cartoon from the 1950s depicting a Black boy with big lips wearing earrings, a loincloth and a bone in his hair as the primary character.

Diaz shared that he pushed his son to get a job with Tesla, efforts he now regrets because he, too, was exposed to a racially hostile workplace.

Bernard Alexander, Diaz’s attorney, pleaded with the jurors during the final arguments to hold Tesla accountable for his client’s suffering and the company’s failure to stop the racist harassment of employees.

Alexander, who urged the jury to choose damages that “will get Tesla’s attention,” described Tesla as a business that must accuse others of lying because it cannot justify why it would permit violations of the Civil Rights Act at its factory.

The plaintiff’s lawyer asked the jury to give Diaz $6.3 million in past non-economic damages and $2 million in future damages, with punitive damages for Tesla estimated to be around $150 million.

Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Tesla, argued that instead of receiving millions of dollars in damages, Diaz should only receive compensation equal to about half of his annual pay — or a few tens of thousands. 

On Friday, Spiro told the jury that Diaz “lied to you,” painting the former contract worker as an aggressive individual who frequently exaggerated details in his evidence, including the time he worked for Tesla. Spiro further alleged that Diaz fabricated his pain to get a larger settlement from the company.

According to the legal information website Plainsite, Tesla has been sued more than 200 times in the United States since 2018 by current or former workers and contractors, not including cases that went to arbitration immediately. 

Just last week, John Goode, a Black former service manager, filed a lawsuit in Northern California alleging his white male supervisor at Tesla mistreated him and a Black colleague in Georgia. Goode claimed his boss terminated him on fabricated grounds after he objected to the treatment.

Diaz’s attorney cited the Civil Rights Act as he urged the jury to make an example out of Tesla, adding, “Do justice, and justice is not cheap.”

“No Black man in 2015 should ever be subjected,” Alexander noted, NBC reported, “to this plantation mentality workplace.”

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