SAN JOSE, Calif. – Joseph Pitts wakes up at night reliving the blatant racism he says he experienced while working for Southwest Airlines at San Francisco International Airport.
Pitts’ sleep is also being disrupted by his family’s financial difficulties, which arose because Southwest fired him instead 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 seeking 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 in 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 man, pointing out that he had used the slur at work before, the lawsuit says. But after the meeting, the man said the word to Pitts again, and when Pitts told him he didn’t like it, the man 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 many of the ramp agents had worked at the facility 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 about the continued use of the racial slur by workers of all races, a supervisor told him that a ramp agent had threatened to file frivolous complaints against him in an attempt to “get him kicked out,” the lawsuit says.
Pitts’ lawsuit is similar to allegations against other Bay Area companies. Last month, a black former employee of an airport services company at San Francisco International Airport filed a lawsuit alleging that a company locker had a sticker depicting Adolf Hitler and a swastika on it and that his supervisor forced him to eat alone in a dirty laundry storage room known as “the cage.”
Tesla is facing a series of legal actions, including a class-action lawsuit alleging that black workers at the company’s electric car factory in Fremont have been victims of abuses including rampant racial slurs and graffiti. Two judges have pointed to widespread racism at 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.
When a Southwest administrator came to SFO for a training session last October, Pitts asked him if he knew the slur was commonly used at the airline’s facilities, the lawsuit says. When the man told him he had heard of it, Pitts recounted his experience and named three employees he believed were targeting him, the lawsuit says.
The alleged abuse and Southwest’s failure to stop it caused Pitts to develop chest pains, and a doctor advised him to stay home from work for a period of time, he said. Pitts provided his supervisors with a doctor’s note, he said.
Still, a manager raised concerns about Pitts’ presence and threatened to fire him, the lawsuit says. She told him that if he was unhappy at SFO, he could be transferred to another airport but would be demoted, the lawsuit says. Such a demotion would have cut his pay by about a third, to $20 an hour, Pitts said.
In mid-November, Pitts and another supervisor were talking in 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 workers 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 another agent load luggage onto a conveyor belt, the lawsuit says. One of the men told a manager he had collected 50 signatures from ramp agents pledging to file a complaint against Pitts, the lawsuit says.
Shortly afterward, according to the suit, Southwest decided to put a sign in the break room asking employees to stop using the racist slur, the manager said. The next day, the manager told him the airline had completed its investigation into his reports of a hostile work environment and employee retaliation against him, the suit said. Then the manager fired him on the grounds that he had not cooperated with the investigation, the suit said.
Pitts had to dip into his retirement fund after he lost his job in December as the primary breadwinner of the home he shares 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 is currently ill, is putting off a doctor’s visit because of the cost, 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?”
