Pratt & Whitney reaches settlement in class action anti-poaching lawsuit

Contributed Simsbury-based CHK Architects designed Pratt & Whitney's World Headquarters in East Hartford, above.

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RTX’s Pratt & Whitney unit has reached a settlement in a class action lawsuit that claims the East Hartford-based aerospace manufacturer engaged in an anti-poaching conspiracy in an effort to keep labor costs in check.

In a document filed Aug. 30 in U.S. District Court in Connecticut, the company states “it has reached a settlement in principle” with the plaintiffs to resolve their claims “on a classwide basis.”

The document does not provide any details of the proposed settlement, but a report published Thursday by Reuters news service cited an unnamed source stating that RTX had agreed to pay $33 million to end the lawsuit.

An attorney representing Pratt & Whitney, John W. Cerreta of the Hartford law firm Day Pitney LLP, declined to comment Thursday on the lawsuit or the proposed settlement. A spokesman for RTX said the company does not “have a comment at this time.”

An attorney for the plaintiffs did not respond to a request for comment.

In the document filed Aug. 30, Pratt & Whitney notes that the other five defendants in the class action lawsuit had reached a separate settlement and filed a motion on July 12 seeking preliminary approval from the court.

According to court documents, in exchange for dismissing the lawsuit with prejudice and certain releases, the other defendants agreed to settlement payments that total $26.5 million. The individual settlements consist of:

Belcan Engineering Group LLC paying $9.9 million.
QuEST Global Services-NA Inc. paying $8.2 million.
Cyient Inc. paying $7.4 million.
Agilis Engineering Inc. paying $1 million.

The money will be deposited in an escrow fund for the benefit of class members.

The other defendant, Parametric Solutions Inc. (PSI), is currently in bankruptcy and will not provide a cash settlement, but agreed to provide “additional discovery and cooperation to support” to the plaintiffs in their case against Pratt & Whitney, the document states.

Combined with the reported $33 million settlement from RTX’s Pratt & Whitney unit, the total settlement fund would be $59.5 million.

The lawsuit was filed by nine former engineers who were employed by Pratt & Whitney and other defendants after a former outsourcing manager at Pratt, Mahesh Patel, was charged in 2021 with “conspiracy in restraint of trade” by the U.S. Justice Department.

Patel was accused of enforcing a “no poaching” agreement among aerospace companies and suppliers, and of “berating” those who cheated on the secret agreement by recruiting workers from each others’ firms.

In mid-December 2021, five people were charged as co-conspirators, including three men from Connecticut.

All of those charged later were acquitted by a federal judge before a jury issued a verdict in the case.

Still, the class action lawsuit claimed the anti-poaching agreement illegally limited workers’ potential earnings and career opportunities. With more than 20 similar lawsuits filed in the case, the cases were merged into a class action, with the size of the class estimated at approximately 43,000 members.

On Tuesday, the plaintiffs filed a motion asking the court to certify the class.

The case is captioned Borozny et al. v. RTX Corp., Pratt & Whitney Division, et al.