Oakland Airport Skycap Says Workplace Injury Left Her Homeless

California’s workers’ compensation system is intended to ensure employees injured on the job quickly receive medical care while claims are investigated. Benefits may also include partial wage replacement during recovery. But interviews with Vernon, several coworkers and a former supervisor suggest those protections may have broken down in her case, illustrating how workers can fall through the system’s cracks with devastating financial and medical consequences.

Vernon lost her housing, car and life’s savings after 22 years of working for airline services contractors at the Oakland airport, she said, including five years as a Prospect employee.

“It’s unfair. I needed a lot of help throughout the process, and I felt like they failed me. I didn’t know where to begin as far as medical coverage, how to seek any type of support,” Vernon said. “I hit rock bottom. I became homeless because of that.”

Most California employers are responsible for arranging prompt medical attention for a work-related injury. State law also required the company to give Vernon a workers’ compensation claim form within a day and report the incident to its insurance company within five days, both critical steps to beginning the benefits process. None of that happened, according to Vernon and a former supervisor.

Instead, Vernon said her manager, Salesh Prasad, told her to go home shortly after her fall. He directed a coworker to drive her to the airport employee parking lot, where she was left alone in her car, with no clear guidance about medical care. She tried contacting Prasad in the days that followed, but he became unresponsive, she said, finally asking her to turn in her security badge.

Attempts to reach Prospect Airport Services were unsuccessful. Unifi Aviation, which owns Prospect, declined several requests for comment. Unifi, North America’s largest provider of aviation services, operates at more than 240 airports. The Atlanta-based company, which generates about $2 billion in revenue, is a subsidiary of the privately held Argenbright Holdings, its majority owner, and Delta Air Lines.

Southwest Airlines, which contracts with Prospect at OAK, deferred questions to the company.

According to labor experts, the chain of contractors servicing airlines incentivizes cost-cutting, leaving low-wage workers who push passengers in wheelchairs, clean airplane cabins and handle baggage with eroded benefits and job conditions, particularly if they are not unionized, as is the case with Prospect’s Oakland baggage handlers.

It’s unclear whether the company’s alleged failure to respond to Vernon’s injury as required by law was an isolated incident or part of a broader pattern.

Failures to follow workers’ compensation laws are often the result of employers not properly training or overseeing their managers, said Jason Marcus, former president of the California Applicants’ Attorneys Association, whose members represent injured workers in the workers’ compensation system.

“I’ve certainly seen my fair share of what we kind of refer to as horror stories,” said Marcus, who has nearly two decades of experience. “Somebody gets hurt, suffers a serious injury, and is kind of left to their own devices without any real help or guidance from their employer. And that’s just not how it’s supposed to work.”

By the time Nicole Owens visited Vernon at her home in March, she was dismayed to find her long-time friend mostly immobile, in pain and depressed. The last time the pair — who refer to each other as sisters — had seen each other was in September 2024, when they’d danced together at the Oakland Arena during an Usher show, Vernon’s favorite performer, Owens said.

“It was very shocking, I’ll be honest with you, because I’m used to my sister working two jobs and being very mobile, full of life, always moving around,” said Owens, 48, a program manager at PG&E. “So to see her in this state, it was just very disheartening.”

Owens said that, after calling Prospect three times without receiving a response, she helped Vernon, who is estranged from relatives, find medical help. Doctors at Alameda Health System have since diagnosed Vernon with a nerve disorder, chronic bilateral low back pain and right-sided sciatica. At the Fairmont Rehabilitation and Wellness Center, where Vernon has lived for about a year, she continues to take cortisone shots to manage her pain. She remains unable to walk without fearing she will fall.

A Prospect supervisor who was not present at the airport the morning of Vernon’s accident but later checked on her case in the company’s computer system said he found no evidence of an on-the-job injury report, a medical filing, an insurance claim or other paperwork indicating that proper procedures were followed.

“It’s a complete negligence on the part of the company,” said Alan Norris, a Prospect training supervisor who said he helped Vernon file a formal complaint with Cal/OSHA, which is investigating. “She should have had a good outcome, at least a reasonable outcome. ‘Hey, she got injured, OK, let’s get you the help.’ But no, she was completely ignored, thrown under the bus.”

Norris was fired earlier this year. He believes he was retaliated against for reporting what he described as a “toxic work environment” to Prospect’s human resources department and Southwest. According to Norris, Vernon and a current employee who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, some Prospect managers allowed favoritism, harassment and other problems to fester at OAK while the company failed to address conduct they described as illegal or incompetent.

In 2023, Prospect agreed to a confidential settlement to resolve a lawsuit by a female dispatcher at the airport who alleged she was wrongly terminated after managers, including Prasad, failed to prevent a supervisor’s sexual harassment, which she claimed began weeks after she was hired, according to KQED’s review of public records.

Prasad stopped working for Prospect in February, according to his LinkedIn profile. Reached by phone, Prasad confirmed he was no longer working for the company and declined to answer questions about Vernon. “Better contact the company,” he said before hanging up.

In April, Vernon and other airline service contractors at the Oakland airport spoke about safety hazards and other alleged labor law violations before the Port of Oakland Board of Commissioners, which oversees the airport. Accompanying the workers were organizers with SEIU-USWW, calling on the Port to adopt policies that the union said would incentivize regulatory compliance by contractors, which operate under agreements with the airlines — not the airport.

The union said the Port is considering a measure that would affirm workers’ rights to unionize without retaliation, similar to one already in place at the San Francisco International Airport.

The Port requires all contractors and employers operating at the airport to comply with applicable federal, state and local labor laws, but it’s up to separate enforcement agencies to investigate any alleged violations, said Justin Berton, communications director for the Port. The Port, however, is reviewing its tenant labor standards and discussing the airport contractor concerns raised by workers.

“We’re taking these issues very, very seriously,” Andreas Cluver, president of the Oakland Board of Port Commissioners, told workers during the April 9 meeting.