LAWSUITS NEWS & LEGAL INFORMATION

San Diego, CA A year and a half ago, Sylvester Owino and Jonathan Gomez filed a California unpaid wages lawsuit against CoreCivic, a for-profit business that runs private prisons, including the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego. The lawsuit alleges violations of federal human trafficking laws and California labor laws relating to minimum wage, overtime, and meal breaks, among other things. Discovery is expected to continue into March 2019, with a trial to follow.
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Chicago, IL: Yet another lawsuit was filed in November against First Unum for allegedly denying long-term disability benefits. In the same month, Unum announced to the media that it had donated $300,000 to a high-school girls’ leadership program.
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Santa Clara, CA: Pharmaceutical giant Teva was ordered by an eight-person jury last month to pay $6.3 million to a former manager who filed a discrimination employment lawsuit against the Israeli company.
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San Diego, CA In 2015 Jesus Cuitlahuac Garcia, a taxi driver, filed a California unpaid wages lawsuit against Border Transportation Group (BTG) claiming unpaid wages, wrongful termination and a variety of related labor law violations. In October 2018, the California Court of Appeal, Fourth Appellate District handed Mr. Garcia an apparently empty victory.
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Boston, MA Brandi Salls’ excessive overdraft fees lawsuit against Digital Federal Credit Union (DFCU) has survived the credit union’s Motion to Dismiss. This is good news, but it was a near thing, at least with respect to some of the counts. Claimants in similar credit union lawsuits should take away five important lessons.
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San Francisco CA: School groundskeeper DeWayne Johnson was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2014 at the age of 42. He is the first cancer victim to take Monsanto (now owned by drug giant Bayer) to court. In August, Johnson was awarded $289 million but damages were later to reduced to $78 million. And the first out of more than 620 Monsanto cancer cases pending in federal litigation is set for February 2019, according to Reuters.
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Hermitage, TN On October 19, 2018, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that Tennessee contractor, Vasquez Drywall, had agreed to pay $103,300 in back wages to workers misclassified as independent contractors and a $2,424 civil penalty. Employment misclassification is rampant in the construction industry in Tennessee and throughout the country. The practice deprives employees of overtime pay, workers compensation insurance and basic workplace safety protections. Undocumented construction workers are particularly at risk because they are unlikely to bring lawsuits or seek other enforcement action to preserve their rights.
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