Tesla, an electric vehicle manufacturer, has reached a settlement to resolve a case alleging racism discrimination. In 2015, a federal jury awarded Owen Diaz, a Black man employed as an elevator operator at its Fremont, California plant, $3.2 million in damages. Through email, attorney Lawrence Organ of the California Civil Rights Law Group, who was representing Diaz, informed CNBC:
“The parties have reached an amicable resolution of their disputes. The terms of the settlement are confidential and we will not have additional comment.”
In Marcus Vaughn v. Tesla Inc., a proposed class action lawsuit, the same company is representing current and former Tesla employees, claiming that the carmaker has persisted in its discriminatory discrimination and harassment of Black workers. Diaz is not involved in the legal dispute. The paper stated that all parties agree that the problem has been settled and that the lawsuit against Elon Musk’s firm may be dismissed, but it provided no further specifics about the arrangement.
Legal Battle Continues as Tesla Faces Accusations of Racial Harassment and Retaliation
Messages were left on Saturday asking for information from Lawrence Organ, Diaz’s attorney, and Tesla lawyers. The April decision was the second indictment in Diaz’s lawsuit against Tesla, which aimed to hold the manufacturer accountable for permitting him to endure racist epithets and other mistreatment during his brief employment at the Fremont, California, plant.
However, compared to the $137 million Diaz obtained in his first trial in 2021, the jury of eight members in the most recent trial, which lasted five days, reached a far lesser damages verdict. Diaz and his attorneys decided to pursue a new trial rather than accept the $15 million award that US District Judge William Orrick had lowered. Organ and Tesla both filed notices of cross-appeal in November, announcing that Organ and Diaz would be appealing the $3.2 million decision.
The dispute, which started in 2017, is centered on claims that Tesla failed to act to address a racist culture at its manufacturing, which is situated around 40 miles (65 km) southeast of San Francisco. During his roughly nine months at Tesla, which ended in 2016, Diaz, a Black man, claimed he was ordered to go back to Africa, shown racist cartoons, and called the N-word more than thirty times.
Tesla Faces Accusations of Racial Harassment and Retaliation by EEOC
In a separate lawsuit, Tesla is accused of breaking federal law by tolerating widespread and ongoing racial harassment of its Black employees and by subjecting some of these workers to retaliation for opposing the harassment, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A false narrative that ignores Tesla’s track record of equal employment opportunity, is how Tesla has described the EECO’s accusations.
Tensions with several California authorities about operations at the Fremont factory were a contributing factor in the 2021 relocation of Tesla’s headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas, which was spearheaded by Elon Musk, the company’s CEO and main shareholder.
The agreement with Diaz was reached as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who also serves as CTO, is under fire from several quarters for how he has handled hate speech on X, the old Twitter. A request for comment from Tesla, which does not have a conventional PR office in North America, was unanswered.
