T1B

Terry in Crapchester wrote:Who stole mvscal's password?

mvscal wrote:There are four RICO cases working their way through the Federal court system right now. The one versus Mohawk Industries being the most prominent.

RadioFan wrote:

mvscal wrote:There are four RICO cases working their way through the Federal court system right now. The one versus Mohawk Industries being the most prominent.

Elaborate, por favor.

Workers using anti-mobster law in fight over pay

The plaintiffs are claiming that some employers and recruiters are conspiring to bring in illegal immigrants to keep company wages low.
H.J. Cummins, Star Tribune

Last update: May 31, 2006 – 10:18 PM

It's all well and good to calculate the full impact of illegal immigrants on the communities where they come to work -- making money through wages, costing money because of children in schools, spending money locally and so on.

But what about in one workplace?

What if you work somewhere and you're convinced your pay is less because a lot of illegal immigrants are working around you, driving down the going wage?

Some employees in that situation are suing. And they're using a law you've probably heard of mostly in FBI or Mafia movies: The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO.

The U.S. Supreme Court is about to rule on one case. And in another, in Washington state, a fruit grower recently agreed to an out-of-court, $1.3 million settlement. The firm admitted no wrongdoing, but it is the first time legal U.S. workers will be paid damages for depressed wages connected to illegal immigrants, according to the employees' attorney.

Basically, the handful of RICO cases across the country accuse employers of a form of organized crime: collaborating with others, including staffing companies, to pack their workplaces with illegal immigrants knowing they'd work cheap and drive down wages. Their alleged tactics include bonuses to recruiters for undocumented workers, isolating those workers in separate housing, and providing them false documents.

The legal co-workers have suffered collateral damage, they say in class-action lawsuits filed against the companies. Some ask for past lost wages; RICO allows for triple damages.

The lawsuits are a creative and useful application of RICO, a federal statute that already has been applied beyond the world of mobsters to targets as varied as Medicare fraud and terrorism, employment and RICO attorneys said.

But they caution against overreaching and hitting employers who unknowingly do business with unscrupulous staffing firms, for example.

In the Washington state case, Zirkle Fruit Co. settled last December. Its executives said the company wanted to put the lawsuit behind it.

The case now before the Supreme Court involves Georgia-based Mohawk Industries Inc., one of the country's biggest carpeting and rug manufacturers, with about 30,000 employees.

Mohawk's appeal argues that it is not a part of a conspiracy -- a RICO requirement -- with its staffing agency, as the lawsuit claims.

The court agreed to clarify what constitutes a conspiracy, what RICO would call a larger "enterprise" with others of ongoing criminal acts.

"If I have a business contract with a staffing agency, and that agency does something wrong, can I be held liable under RICO?" is the question employers want answered, said employment attorney Kevin Lindsey of the Halleland Lewis Nilan & Johnson law firm in Minneapolis.

"That would greatly expand RICO, and for most employers that would be going a little too far," Lindsey said.

An interesting side development, he said, is that Mohawk is being sued under the Georgia RICO as well as the federal RICO statutes. Minnesota is among the states with its own RICO statute, he said.

That's one way to bring immigration, an otherwise federal issue, down to the states, he said, some of which want to be more activist than the federal government.

Lindsey said he could see why some state attorneys general "might feel they would be more vigilant than the federal government."

RICO's purpose is not to punish a business person who makes some hiring mistakes, or who has a sloppy human-relations department, said Michele Garnett McKenzie, an attorney at Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights.

"It's far, far worse conduct required than, say, they were just lazy in checking papers," she said.

Some companies knowingly and systematically exploit illegal workers, said Jeff Keyes, a RICO attorney at the Briggs and Morgan law firm in Minneapolis.

"And that smacks an awful lot like the type of criminal enterprise RICO was designed for," Keyes said.

Those companies are also a problem for his corporate clients that have to compete against them, he said.

"I think RICO can and should be used to get the very heart of the problem," Keyes said. "You can build all the walls around the borders that you want, you can have all the guest worker programs you want, but until you find some way to take away incentives from employers who shave the rules, the problem will always be there."

http://www.startribune.com/168/story/466017.html