When Joseph Pitts, 53, was hired as a ramp agent by Southwest Airlines in early 2022 he saw it as a way to support his wife and two children. What he didn’t expect was the rampant use of the N-word and other discriminatory behavior he encountered there, reports the Sacramento Bee.
“I didn’t want to come to work and hear that,” Pitts said in an interview with the Sacramento Bee. “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.”
Rather than address the racism, Southwest chose to fire him instead, Pitts alleges in his lawsuit. He’s suing for unspecified damages.
Pitts’ woes started when he received a promotion to ramp agent supervisor in August 2023 and was transferred from San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport (OAK) to San Francisco International Airport (SFO).
According to his lawsuit, while Pitts was in training a Black Southwest employee referred to him with the n-word and was reprimanded by a fellow supervisor as he’d used the slur before. The man then used the word for a second time and when Pitts protested saying he didn’t like it, the employee said he would stop saying the word only to say it again almost immediately.
Once Pitts raised his concerns about widespread use of the slur by employees of all races to his bosses, he was told that a ramp agent had threatened to file frivolous claims against Pitts to “get him out,” recounts the lawsuit.
In October of the same year when a Southwest administrator came to SFO to oversee training, Pitts asked him if he’d heard about unchecked use of the n-word at the company, when the administrator said that he had, Pitts identified three employees he thought were targeting him and relayed his experiences.
But the provocations only continued, according to the lawsuit.
In mid-November while he and a supervisor were talking in an office with its door open right next to the break room, Pitts allegedly heard a ramp agent storm into the break room and complain that employees couldn’t “say the b-word and the n-word anymore,” then proceeded to swear and use the n-word. When Pitts came into the break room he was met by “hostile glares,” reports the Sacramento Bee.
The lack of action on the part of Southwest to stop the alleged abuse gave Pitts chest pains and his doctor suggested he take some time off to recuperate. Pitts said he gave his doctor’s note to his managers, but one manager was still displeased with his absence and threatened to fire him. She gave him a stark warning that if he was unhappy at SFO he could transfer to another airport but would be demoted. The demotion would cost him one-third of his pay, reducing his salary to $20 an hour, said Pitts, so he remained at SFO.
Finally in December of 2023, hostilities reached a fever pitch when Pitts was prevented from helping a fellow ramp agent load baggage onto the belt by two other agents. One of whom informed Pitts’ manager that he’d collected 50 signatures of ramp agents who’d pledged to file grievances against him, the lawsuit alleges.
Soon after, Southwest posted a note in the break room telling employees not to use the racial slur. The next day, Pitts’ lawsuit alleges that a Southwest manager informed him that they’d concluded their investigation of his complaint about a hostile work environment and co-worker retaliation against him; then proceeded to fire Pitts on the grounds that he hadn’t assisted with the investigation.
Pitts has now been unemployed since last December and with an ailing wife at home plus two young children to raise, he’s had to lean on his retirement funds and is unsure how he’ll make ends meet moving forward. “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 told the Sacramento Bee.
Pitts isn’t the only former Southwest employee who’s accused the airline of racial discrimination. Matern Law Group, the law firm Pitts hired, is representing three other Black ramp agents with similar claims.
Additionally, Southwest isn’t alone in facing accusations of anti-Black racism. As Essence reported in May, three Black men sued American Airlines for racial discrimination. In that case, a white flight attendant claimed that an unidentified individual had body odor and Black men were targeted for removal from the flight in a humiliating act of racial profiling, said the plaintiffs.
As for Pitts, he wanted Southwest to uphold their own values and is confused by their actions to the contrary. “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 to the Sacramento Bee. “Why would you do this to me?”