Class Action Claims Pro-Health Failed to Provide Mandatory Notice Prior to March 2021 Layoffs

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A proposed class action claims Pro-Health unlawfully failed to provide at least 60 days’ notice before terminating more than 50 immigrant workers at its Wray, Colorado potato processing plant in March 2021.

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According to the 10-page suit, the Texas-based produce processor violated the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act when it fired a significant portion of its workforce around March 22, 2021 without proper notice or good cause. The complaint alleges that the “mass layoff” was part of Pro-Health’s plan to replace its immigrant employees with non-immigrant guestworkers on H-2A visas. 

“H-2A workers are more easily exploitable than other workers because their visas tie them to their employer, limiting their ability to seek better jobs,” the case contests. “Additionally, upon information and belief, it was cheaper for ProHealth to employ guestworkers at the Facility than to retain its workforce, including Plaintiffs, who had been working at the Facility for many years, in some cases for more than a decade.”

Per the filing, the company began terminating much of its existing workforce shortly after it was approved to hire H-2A guest workers.

Earlier that month, Pro-Health instructed employees to provide proof of authorization to work in the United States as part of an apparent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) audit, the complaint says. However, the case claims that ICE did not audit the facility in March 2021, and the agency had not asked Pro-Health to provide the immigration status of its employees at the Colorado facility.

Rather, Pro-Health fabricated the March 2021 audit as pretext to terminate over 50 workers without 60 days’ notice, the lawsuit alleges. The case further charges that Pro-Health failed to pay terminated employees 60 days of wages and benefits in lieu of notice, pursuant to the WARN Act.

As a company that employs more than 100 employees who clock at least 4,000 hours per week, exclusive of overtime, within the United States, Pro-Health was required to comply with the WARN Act, the filing contends. The company’s layoff was also subject to federal notice requirements given that it let go more than 33 percent of its workforce and at least 50 full-time employees, the complaint relays.

Pro-Health workers had become increasingly concerned about their working conditions in the months leading up to the mass layoff, the suit notes, claiming that the company had reduced workers’ rest breaks from 15 minutes to 10 minutes for every four hours of work. In addition, Pro-Health provided only one men’s bathroom for over 40 men and “dangerous and unsanitary” women’s bathrooms without functioning doors, the complaint contends.

The lawsuit looks to cover anyone who worked at Pro-Health’s Wray, Colorado facility and was terminated without cause within 30 days of March 22, 2021, or was terminated without cause as the “reasonably foreseeable consequence” of the mass layoff ordered by the company on or about March 22, 2021.

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