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Home Air Cargo Carriers News

Court overturns Pamt’s victory in racial harassment suit

September 26, 2025
in Air Cargo Carriers News, Air Cargo News, Air Freight Forwarder News, Airports News, Breakbulk Shipping News, Bunkering News, Chemical Shipping News, Cold Storage News, Container Shipping News, Crude Oil Shipping News, Cruise Shipping News, Dry Bulk Shipping News, Fishing News, Freight Forwarders News, Freight Rates & Reports News, Global Ports News, Green Logistics News, Incidents News, LNG & LPG Shipping News, Logistics News, Logistics Parks News, Maritime & Logistics News, Maritime & Ocean News, Maritime Safety & Security News, Multimodal Transport News, Offshore News, Pilotage News, Piracy News, Port Accidents News, Port Congestion News, Port Infrastructure News, Port Strike News, Railway News, Responsibility Projects News, Ro-Ro Shipping News, Schedules News, Services News, Ship Breaking News, Shipbuilding News, Smart Development and Growth News, Straits News, Supply Chain News, Tech. & Sustainability News, Trucking News, Useful Maritime Associations News, Vessels News, Warehousing News
Court overturns Pamt’s victory in racial harassment suit
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A lawsuit against truckload carrier PAMT charging the company had created a racially hostile work environment for two African American drivers will head back to a lower federal court after an earlier victory for the truckload carrier was overturned on appeal Thursday.

A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit unanimously agreed with the appeal of former PAMT (NASDAQ: PAMT) truck drivers Michael Smith and Monaletto Sneed that the lower court in May 2024 erred in granting summary judgement to PAMT (which at the time the drivers worked there and right through to the judgement was called P.A.M. Transport) in the case.

The action sends the lawsuit, first filed in March 2021 in the Middle District of Tennessee, back to the lower court for reconsideration.

While one of the three judges on the appellate court panel disagreed with some of the findings of his colleagues in their reasoning for putting the case back into the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, the ultimate vote on the appeal by Smith and Sneed was unanimous.

M. Reid Estes, an attorney for the Nashville law firm of Dickinson Wright which represented PAMT in the case, said in an email to FreightWaves that it would not comment on the decision except to add “we are heading to trial and are very confident in merits of our case.”

A message sent to the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Janney Law, through its online portal had not been responded to by publication time.

‘Monkey” and ‘monkey ass’

The appellate court’s recap of the allegations by the two drivers paint a picture of an atmosphere at a PAMT facility in Nashville that involved the use of derogatory terms for the two men–”monkey” and “monkey ass” were said to be frequent names used by the drivers’ superiors–and an allegation that while the driver team members the men were part of were all paid flat wages, not as a function of miles, Smith and Sneed were burdened with more hours and assignments than their peers.

Smith and Sneed ended up on PAMT’s Texas Regional Relay (TRR) team, which hauled freight out of Laredo, Texas. According to the court’s recap, “TRR drivers are paid at a daily rate regardless of hours on the road or distance given.”

“According to Smith and Sneed, P.A.M. Transport required them to work more hours than their non-African American counterparts for the same pay,” the appellate court wrote. “Smith testified that he was assigned, relative to his non-African American coworkers, lengthier routes with longer wait times, which caused him to work nearly 70 hours per week. According to Smith, he would complain about his longer work hours directly to his supervisors, who would tell him ‘that’s part of it’ and ‘just do the job.’”

The initial lawsuit and subsequent court findings identified two superiors of Smith and Sneed that the two men said created a hostile work environment: driver manager Jermaine Davis, who also is African American, and operations manager Jordan Claytor, who is white. Although they were assigned to the TRR, Smith and Sneed, as well as the managers, were based out of the Whites Creek facility in Nashville.

‘Hostile and demeaning’

Beyond the use of such terms, as the appellate court said in its recap, there was a broader atmosphere of hostility, according to the drivers. “Smith testified that Davis would speak to him in a hostile and demeaning manner, criticize him, and threaten to terminate or withhold pay from him,” the court said in its recap. “Sneed also testified that Davis and Claytor would criticize, threaten, scream at, and curse at him. Smith and Sneed did not observe or hear about any instances in which their non-African American coworkers received similar verbal abuse.”

The recap of Smith and Sneed’s allegations also include repeated attempts by the two men to have other officials in the company step in and halt the behavior. “According to Sneed, nothing was done to stop the misconduct,” the recap said.

In a strongly critical review of the lower court’s decision to grant summary judgement to PAMT, it first took aim at the Tennessee court’s conclusion that use of the monkey-related terms was not “not plainly racist.”

Like the n word

“The term ‘monkey’ has an extensive history as a racial slur against African Americans,” the appellate court wrote. Citing an earlier precedent from the Fourth Circuit, the appellate court quoted its statement that the “use of the word ‘monkey’ to describe African Americans carries ‘similar odiousness’ as the use of the word “n….r.’”’

“Consequently, circuit courts, including our circuit, have overwhelmingly held that the use of the term ‘monkey’ against an African American employee constitutes evidence of race-based harassment sufficient to support a hostile work environment claim,” the court added.

One aspect of the case was notable: the drivers’ manager Davis is also African American. That does not undercut the impact of the use of the “monkey” term, the court wrote. Quoting a precedent in the Sixth Circuit, the appellate court said federal discrimination statutes “can be violated by members of the same race or sex as the victim of discrimination.”

The district court’s move to grant summary judgement also included a distinction of identifying skin color between Black and African-American. The finding was necessary to tackle the question of whether the two men suffered disparate and unfair treatment because of their race.

An example of the lower court’s finding can be seen in this passage: “Because Sneed’s protected class is African American—as opposed to Black, importantly—the relevant comparators for him must be non-African American, which is not synonymous with being ‘white’; a person can be African American even if someone might characterize them as being ‘white’ based on a subjective perception of how light-colored their skin may be.”

After parsing through the somewhat complex logic of the district court, the appellate court ultimately chose to ignore those distinctions. “We have routinely accepted, at summary judgment, plaintiff testimony of disparate, race-based treatment grounded in experience and perception,” the appellate court wrote.

The question of defining the race of Smith, Sneed and their co-workers was necessary in determining the reality of the environment the two men faced at work.

Smith and Sneed, the court said, “assert that non-African Americans were not subjected to the same hostile and demeaning treatment, and they point in part to Smith’s testimony that he consistently overheard Davis speak to non-African American drivers in a ‘more professional’ manner,” the appellate court wrote.

After reviewing some of the allegations of Smith and Sneed, and the defense of PAMT, the appellate court was straightforward: “The alleged verbal abuse by Plaintiffs’ supervisors thus constitutes an additional piece of evidence of racial harassment, and the district court erred by rejecting it.”

Little pushback from the company

The appellate court also appears critical of PAMT and its efforts–or lack thereof–to stop racial harassment. While there was an Anti-Discrimination and Harassment Policy at PAMT that was given to the two drivers, the appellate court said that “P.A.M. Transport points to no evidence, and does not even attempt to argue, that it had an effective policy. It makes no mention of the policy’s ‘requirements’ on supervisors or the ‘training regarding the policy’—both of which are baseline requirements for establishing the existence of a reasonable harassment policy.”

More articles by John Kingston

PAMT wound up in violation of a debt covenant at the end of 2Q: SEC filing

Federal government fires back in court over California waiver cancellation

Teamsters grows influence in Amazon’s food network via UNFI success

The post Court overturns Pamt’s victory in racial harassment suit appeared first on FreightWaves.

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