Aerospace and defense giant RTX’s (RTX.N) Pratt & Whitney unit is now the last defendant in a potentially high-stakes lawsuit over an alleged conspiracy to restrict hiring and recruitment after a global engineering services firm inked a settlement with the plaintiffs.
Attorneys leading the proposed class action case disclosed the settlement with Belcan Engineering Group LLC in a filing late Thursday in Connecticut federal court.
No terms were disclosed. The deal is still subject to court approval. An expert for the plaintiffs has estimated industry-wide damages to be between $384 million and $1.18 billion.
Ohio-headquartered Belcan did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and attorneys for the plaintiffs at law firms Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and DiCello Levitt said they could not comment on the terms of the settlement before it is finalized.
No Immediate response
Virginia-based RTX, formerly known as Raytheon, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit accused aerospace engineering services firms of breaking antitrust law and suppressing wages through “no poach” agreements not to hire one another’s employees. Several outsourcing firms that work with Pratt & Whitney on engineering projects have already reached settlements in the case.
The plaintiffs are workers in the industry who sued in Connecticut in late 2021 after the U.S. Justice Department charged a former Pratt & Whitney executive and others in a criminal conspiracy to restrict employee mobility.
A judge last year acquitted the defendants, saying “no reasonable juror” could have found that competition had stopped for skilled aerospace labor.
In the civil litigation, U.S. District Judge Sarala Nagala in 2023 declined to dismiss the claims against Pratt & Whitney and the other defendants. Nagala said, “The plaintiffs’ complaint adequately alleges that the no-poach agreements at issue had no legitimate business purpose.”
The lawyers in the civil case have asked Nagala to certify the case as a class action. The plaintiffs have estimated a class size at “thousands of employees.”
