Dive Brief:
- Several dozen employees of Rubicon Contacting, a Utah-based facility management and landscaping company, are suing the Utah attorney general’s office, the state’s former attorney general and former prosecutors for compensation after they lost income when their employer was raided last year on labor trafficking charges that have since been dropped.
- “Defendants’ conduct caused widespread negative publicity, with foreseeable, indeed expectable, serious economic consequences,” attorneys for the employees say in the complaint they filed in Utah state court earlier this week. “Moreover, the [office of the Utah attorney general] took the aggressive and affirmative step of directly contacting Rubicon’s clients and customers to discourage them from continuing to do business with Rubicon. The foreseeable result was destruction of Rubicon’s business and direct damages to the employees of Rubicon and its affiliates.” Facilities Dive has been provided a copy of the complaint.
- Although the employees weren’t included in the labor trafficking charges against their employer, they’ve suffered lost income and are seeking “accountability and some degree of recompense for the real harm they have suffered,” the complaint says.
Dive Insight:
Rubicon Contracting was the target of a high-profile raid by the Utah attorney general’s office last year. State prosecutors, with TV media crews accompanying them, used warrants to enter the company’s offices to obtain evidence the company was violating labor trafficking laws in the way it was employing workers in the country on temporary H-2B visas. The company was accused of confiscating the workers’ documentation, forcing them to live in company-owned housing, controlling their access to bank accounts and threatening to deport them.
Criminal charges were filled, but they were dropped. The company and its owners have since sued the attorney general’s office, the former attorney general who oversaw the office during the raid, Sean Reyes, and several prosecutors who worked under Reyes for malicious prosecution. They allege the prosecutors used information they knew to be false to obtain the warrants. The lawsuit is seeking $1 billion in damages to compensate the owners for lost business as a result of the raid and prosecution.
In their lawsuit, the employees are saying that, like the owners, they’re entitled to lost compensation because of the lost business the company suffered.
“It was foreseeable … that if the [attorney general] targeted a Utah business with hundreds of employees by knowingly submitting false warrant applications, publicizing the raid in the media, contacting and making false statements to customers, that the business would be crippled and the employees would lose their jobs or income,” the complaint said.
The employees are charging the state attorney general’s office and the others with unreasonable search and negligence for allowing prosecutors to make allegedly false statements to obtain the warrants. They’re also charging them with violating their rights under due process and open court laws. The state AG is being charged with vicarious liability since the former officials were acting on behalf of the state.
Sean Reyes, the former AG, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The Utah Office of Attorney General said it had no comment on the lawsuit.
