Joseph Pitts wakes up in the night reliving what he says was the blatant racism he experienced working for Southwest Airlines at San Francisco International Airport.
Further troubling Pitts’ sleep are the financial struggles for his family that came because Southwest, instead of stopping the anti-Black racism he persistently reported, fired him instead, he alleges in a lawsuit accusing the airline of racial discrimination and harassment, wrongful firing and retaliation.
“It makes me have this anxiety, it makes me feel, ‘Was it the right thing that I did?’ Because you’re jobless, you don’t have any 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 started working for Southwest in early 2022 as a ramp agent at San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport. The racism, he alleged in the lawsuit, started when he was promoted to supervisor of ramp agents and transferred to San Francisco International Airport in August 2023.
He was still in training when a Black ramp agent first directed the n-word at him, the lawsuit said. A fellow supervisor reprimanded the man, noting he had used the slur at work before, the lawsuit said. But after the meeting, the man said the word to Pitts again, and when Pitts told him he did not like it, the man said he would not do it again, but almost immediately did, the lawsuit said.
“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 in the facility for years. “I knew it was going to stir up a pot, but these working conditions are not right. For a Fortune 500 company, I wouldn’t think they would have this going on.”
After Pitts made several complaints to his bosses about ongoing use of the racial slur by workers of all races, a supervisor told him a ramp agent threatened to file frivolous grievances against him to “get him out,” the lawsuit said.
Pitts’ lawsuit echoes claims against other Bay Area companies. Last month, a Black former worker for an airport-services firm at San Francisco International Airport filed a lawsuit claiming a company locker had a sticker on it showing Adolf Hitler and a swastika, and that his supervisor made him dine alone in a dirty-laundry storage area known as “the cage.”
Tesla is facing a host of legal actions, including a class-action lawsuit alleging Black workers at the company’s Fremont electric car factory have been subjected to abuses including rampant racist 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 making similar claims.
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When a Southwest administrator came to SFO to deliver training in October of last year, Pitts asked him if he knew about the frequent use of the slur at the airline’s facility, the lawsuit said. When the man told him he had heard about it, Pitts related his experiences, and identified three employees he believed were targeting him, the lawsuit said.
The alleged abuse and failure of Southwest to halt it gave Pitts chest pains, and a doctor advised him to take some time off work, he said. Pitts provided a note from the doctor to his managers, he said.
Still, one manager expressed concerns about Pitts’ attendance and threatened to fire him, the lawsuit alleged. She told him if he was unhappy at SFO he could be transferred to another airport, but would be demoted, the lawsuit claimed. Such a demotion would have slashed his pay by about a third, to $20 an hour, Pitts said.
In mid-November, Pitts and another supervisor were talking in the supervisors’ office, next to the break room, with the door open, and a ramp agent walked into the break room and loudly complained that workers could not “say the b-word and the n-word anymore,” then swore and said the n-word, the lawsuit said. When Pitts came into the break room afterward, he was met with hostile glares, the lawsuit said.
In early December, tension between Pitts and Southwest ramp agents escalated, with two agents blocking him from helping another agent load baggage onto a belt, the lawsuit said. One of the men told a manager he had gathered 50 signatures from ramp agents pledging to file grievances against Pitts, the lawsuit said.
Soon after, the manager said Southwest had decided to put a sign in the break room telling workers not to use the racial slur, according to the lawsuit. The next day, the manager told him the airline had finished its investigation into his reports of a hostile work environment and retaliation by workers against him, the lawsuit said. Then the manager fired him on the grounds that he had failed to assist in the investigation, the lawsuit claimed.
Pitts had to dig into his retirement funds after losing his position in December as primary breadwinner in the home he shares with his wife and their adopted children — a son, 10, and daughter, 9, he said. Health insurance for him and his family via the Southwest job is gone. His wife, currently ill, is putting off a visit to the doctor because of the cost, and he has yet to find work since his December termination, Pitts said.
“Why would you do this to somebody who was trying to make changes, who was trying to tell you that these people are violating company policy?” Pitts said. “Why would you do this to me?”
