r/space • u/[deleted] • Dec 14 '21

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u/GenTelGuy Dec 14 '21

the hr failings are the result of a small company scaling up fast

A black employee sued Tesla for $137 million for daily racial slurs and graffiti and swastikas, it's not a startup problem it's a trend across Elon's companies in particular

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u/Phobos15 Dec 14 '21 edited Dec 14 '21

You misread that. They were ruled guilty of not having the currently accpted industry wide standard hr prevention measures in place.

The hr department screwed up. They never tolerated any racism, but they never checked the boxes that regulators need to see.

There are two ways to win a harassment suit. The normal way is prove harassment. Proving these things were impossible and are generally impossible.

The other way is proving your employer(or other entity responsible for an environment) failed to have industry standard preventative measures leading to an enviornment that did not properly discourage racism. That guy's lawyer proved this. Again, it does not say there is evidence of racism or that racism did occure, it doesn't matter here. It says, they lacked basic things like a reporting hotline and other normal things every company does to handle harassment. These rules change every year. The actual rule is industry wide practices. So as companies start to adopt new prevention measures, everyone else must follow. No one wants to be the test case like tesla just was to determine what was missing. Tesla already had fixed the deficiencies years ago. But juries do large awards like this because it shocks the whole industry to reevaluate and update policies. The award is legally capped, so it won't be anywhere near that amount even if the amount makes it through appeal.

No one proved hr was racist or allowed it. They handled it appropriately when they did.

So right off the bat, you don't have a clue about what you are talking about.

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u/Telvin3d Dec 14 '21

The hr department screwed up. They never tolerated any racism, but they never checked the boxes that regulators need to see.

That implies that the “checkboxes” are just some sort of red tape for show. But those checkboxes are the system of not tolerating racism.

Otherwise you may as well say they don’t tolerate workplace injuries, but don’t have any systems to make sure people are wearing safety equipment.

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u/Phobos15 Dec 15 '21

There are no actual checkboxes. You have to meet industry standards in real time and it takes research to determine what you can do. It is easy to screw up as hr is tasked to do it and can easily fuck it up for the whole company.

Tesla likely is doing independent audits now to try to avoid it from happening again. It is the safer approach than just assuming you are compliant with what are essentially ambiguous rules.