Ex-Tesla Employee Called Racial Slur Wins Rare $1M Award

Slightly off topic, but the biggest eye opener in this article for me was this:<p>&gt; Three-quarters of the $1.02 million award is for Berry’s attorneys’ fees and legal costs. Rushing also directed Tesla to pay the ex-employee $266,278.50 in damages, including $100,000 to compensate for emotional distress.<p>People here on HN can be very quick to make the claim &quot;it&#x27;s illegal to do X&quot; as though that solves the problem.<p>This appears to be about as clear cut a case as you could imagine (for it to be granted against Tesla in arbitration). Could you imagine spending 4 years and $750,000 for a _chance_ at being told you were right, and rewarded less than you souos have made if you had just continued working for them over that time.<p>Back on topic, this man was treated horrifyingly, and Tesla&#x27;s defense of &quot;is absolutely against any form of discrimination, harassment, or unfair treatment of any kind&quot; is laughable, it must be such a slap in the face for Mr. Berry to be told that by an army of lawyers after going through what he did.

&gt;caps years of complaints from Black workers that Tesla turned a blind eye to the commonplace use of racial slurs on the assembly line and was slow to clean up graffiti with swastikas and other hate symbols scrawled in common areas<p>Is this a shitty middle school or a company? I would imagine it&#x27;s not very easy to get a job at Tesla, including for assembly line work. I&#x27;d be shocked if it happened once, let alone repeatedly, and let alone with a slow clean-up response.<p>If it were one employee making the accusation, I&#x27;d believe it, and since it&#x27;s allegedly multiple employees, I especially doubt it&#x27;s false.

&gt; Case law is clear that one instance of a supervisor directing the N-word at a subordinate is sufficient to constitute severe harassment<p>What? Co-workers bantering, maybe, but a manager or supervisor doing something like that in my country would make them virtually unemployable.<p>When would you ever call a subordinate something like that?

&quot;...court filings reveal that the arbitrator found Berry’s allegations more credible than Tesla’s denials, ...&quot;<p>So this was a he said&#x2F;she said case?

I used to work for a credit card company. There was an employee that ran his mortgage business on the side during most of the day at work.<p>So, the company went to fire him. He claimed racism (he was Indian) and sued for $1M. The credit card company not wanting any bad publicity settled giving him nearly that entire amount.