Tesla to face racism allegations from Black worker in open court
Al Jazeera
Owen Diaz alleges that his co-workers at a Tesla factory in California told him to ‘go back to Africa’ and called him racist epithets.
A former factory worker at Tesla Inc. who alleges racism was rampant on the assembly line already has achieved a rare feat: forcing the electric-car maker to fight him in open court.
But when Owen Diaz takes his case to a jury trial starting Friday in San Francisco, he’s up against a company that almost never loses workplace disputes.
Of almost 90 employment-related arbitration complaints filed against Tesla from 2016 to March of this year, the company prevailed in 11 cases decided by a private judge after closed-door hearings, according to data compiled by JAMS, the arbitration service provider that handles the company’s disputes.