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The city of San Francisco, already on notice of how employees of color are treated, now faces a class action lawsuit over racial discrimination claims.
Three Black employees working for different divisions within the city’s government say San Francisco’s Black civil service workforce regularly deals with more disciplinary actions, are paid less and are less likely to be promoted than other employees. The racial discrimination, they contend, is enabled by the city’s human resources department.
“At the heart of the City’s failure to address its systemic discrimination is the City’s reckless and ineffective Department of Human Resources,” the plaintiffs say in the complaint.
The plaintiffs, who initially filed their class action lawsuit Nov. 25 in San Francisco County Superior Court, amended the complaint Wednesday to include another named employee.
The named plaintiffs work for San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency, the Department of Public Health and the Public Utilities Commission, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The complaint argues beyond the lack of career advancement within the city, Black employees’ complaints of harassment and comments that are racist in nature go unhandled.
Keka Robinson-Luqman, one of the named plaintiffs, said in an interview her “morale is in the gutter.”
“The most bothersome to me about all of this is that it’s consistently ongoing,” Robinson-Luqman told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Colleagues who have been there 20-plus years explain almost the same exact issues that I’m going through. Nothing is changing … This needs to stop.”
She worked for the transportation department as a junior management assistant starting in 2016, according to the complaint, and dealt with “weaponized” stereotypes, including being called an “angry black woman” in performance reviews.
Robinson-Luqman’s supervisor, a white woman, promised her a pay raise, she says, but she was only given a title change with no change in compensation. The same boss referred to Robinson-Luqman’s daughter in offensive ways, according to the complaint, including calling the 2-month-old “miss thing.” Robinson-Luqman reports the boss also only referred to Black female coworkers as “girlfriend.”
Alicia Williams, another named plaintiff in the racial discrimination class action lawsuit, worked as a vocational nurse for San Francisco’s health department starting in 2001. She came to work one day to find a note calling her a “black monkey.” Nothing happened until four months later, Williams says, when she got a message about it being too late to review the security camera footage.
She reports being deliberately scheduled for extra long shifts that kept her from taking professional development classes, allowing her white colleagues to attend instead.
Williams says her boss told her she doesn’t have a “friendly-looking” face and used stereotypical gestures and remarks around Black staff.
Her job was given back after a review found her cause for termination to be “racially tinged” in 2014, according to the complaint.
The third named plaintiff, John Hill, worked with the San Francisco’s Public Utilities Commission starting in 1999. He says he hasn’t been moved up the ladder much but “every other non-Black employee has been hired and promoted within just a few years.”
Many of the jobs he was applying for went to family and friends of the managers, according to the class action lawsuit.
The plaintiffs fight to end racial discrimination within the halls of San Francisco’s government follows lawsuits over similar claims this year.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports a former firefighter, an engineer and eight health departments are taking legal action, as well.
Nationally, the class action joins a growing list of racial discrimination-related litigation.
Claims of racial discrimination in the workplace prompted San Francisco to create the Office of Racial Equality in 2019. A resulting report released in March shows “serious disparities between demographic groups, particularly along racial lines.”
That report revealed Black employees make up 15% of the city’s workforce and white employees are nearly twice as likely to be in management positions as Black employees.
Another study by The San Francisco Foundation shows while 60% of the region is made up of people of color, they hold only 29% of top elected offices.
“I understand firsthand why more Black employees are unsuccessful in resolving issues in the city, because the processes and practices, the way that they are currently, are set up to work against Black employees,” Dante King, a founding member of the city’s Black Employee Alliance, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Have you experienced racial discrimination by your human resources department? Let us know in the comments below.
Counsel representing the plaintiffs in this racial discrimination class action lawsuit are Felicia Medina, Jennifer Orthwein and Kevin Love Hubbard of Medina Orthwein LLP; and Therese Cannata, Karl Olson and Michael Ching of Cannata, O’Toole, Fickes & Olson LLP.
The Racial Discrimination Class Action Lawsuit is Keka Robinson-Luqman v. City and County of San Francisco, Case No. CGC-20-588012, in Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco.
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