Joseph Pitts wakes up at night and relives the blatant racism he says he experienced while working for Southwest Airlines at San Francisco International Airport.
Pitts' sleep can also be being disrupted by his family's financial difficulties, which arose because Southwest fired him as a substitute of stopping the anti-black racism he has persistently denounced, as he claims in a lawsuit accusing the airline of racial discrimination and harassment, wrongful firing and retaliation.
“I'm so scared and I'm wondering, 'Was it the right thing I did?' Because you're unemployed and you have no income,” Pitts, 53, of Oakley, said in an interview.
Southwest declined to comment on the lawsuit, which Pitts filed last week in San Mateo County Superior Court. Pitts is looking for unspecified damages.
Pitts began working for Southwest as a ramp agent at San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport in early 2022. The racism, he claims within the lawsuit, began when he was promoted to ramp agent supervisor and transferred to San Francisco International Airport in August 2023.
He was still in training when a Black Ramp agent first used the N-word on him, the lawsuit says. Another supervisor reprimanded the person, declaring that he had used the slur at work before, the lawsuit says. But after the meeting, the person said the word to Pitts again, and when Pitts told him he didn't prefer it, the person said he wouldn't do it again, but almost immediately did it again, the lawsuit says.
“I didn't want to come to work and hear that,” Pitts said in an interview, adding that most of the ramp agents had worked at the power for years. “I knew it would cause an uproar, but these working conditions are not right. At a Fortune 500 company, I didn't think something like that would happen.”
After Pitts repeatedly complained to his bosses in regards to the continued use of the racial slur by staff of all races, a supervisor told him that a ramp agent had threatened to file frivolous complaints against him in an try to “get him kicked out,” the lawsuit says.
Pitts' lawsuit is comparable to allegations against other Bay Area firms. Last month, a black former worker of an airport services company at San Francisco International Airport filed a lawsuit alleging that an organization locker had a sticker depicting Adolf Hitler and a swastika on it and that his supervisor forced him to eat alone in a grimy laundry storage room referred to as “the cage.”
Tesla is facing a series of legal actions, including a class-action lawsuit alleging that black staff at the corporate's electric automotive factory in Fremont have been victims of abuses including rampant racial slurs and graffiti. Two judges have pointed to widespread racism on the Fremont plant.
The law firm representing Pitts is suing Southwest on behalf of three other black ramp agents who make similar allegations of racism.
The alleged abuse and Southwest's failure to stop it caused Pitts to develop chest pains, and a physician advised him to remain home from work for a time period, he said. Pitts provided his supervisors with a physician's note, he said.
Still, a manager raised concerns about Pitts' presence and threatened to fireplace him, the lawsuit says. She told him that if he was unhappy at SFO, he could possibly be transferred to a different airport but can be demoted, the lawsuit says. Such a demotion would have cut his pay by a few third, to $20 an hour, Pitts said.
In mid-November, Pitts and one other supervisor were talking within the supervisor's office next to the break room, with the door open, and a Ramp agent entered the break room and loudly complained that staff were “not allowed to say the B-word and the N-word anymore.” He then cursed and said the N-word, the lawsuit says. When Pitts entered the break room afterward, he was met with hostile looks, the lawsuit says.
In early December, tensions between Pitts and Southwest ramp agents escalated when two agents stopped him from helping one other agent load luggage onto a conveyor belt, the lawsuit says. One of the boys told a manager he had collected 50 signatures from ramp agents pledging to file a grievance against Pitts, the lawsuit says.
Shortly afterward, the manager said, Southwest decided to place up a register the break room asking employees to stop using the racist slur, the lawsuit says. The next day, the manager told him the airline had accomplished its investigation into his reports of a hostile work environment and worker retaliation against him, the lawsuit says. Then the manager fired him on the grounds that he had not cooperated with the investigation, the lawsuit says.
Pitts needed to dip into his retirement fund after he lost his job in December as the first breadwinner of the house he shares together with his wife and their adopted children – a 10-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter – he said. Health insurance for him and his family through the Southwest job is gone. His wife, who’s currently in poor health, is pushing aside a physician's visit due to the associated fee, and he still hasn't found work since quitting in December, Pitts said.
“Why are you doing this to someone who is trying to make change, who is trying to tell you that these people are violating company policy?” Pitts said. “Why are you doing this to me?”
Originally published:
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