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

Tesla Inc. has paid more than $1 million to a Black former employee who won a ruling that the company failed to stop his supervisors from calling him the “N-word” at the electric-car maker’s northern California plant.

The rare discrimination award by an arbitrator to Melvin Berry, which followed a closed-door proceeding, 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. It ends a yearslong and emotionally grueling ...