Centre County construction company Glenn O. Hawbaker sued over wage theft allegations
A major Centre County-based construction contractor charged criminally with stealing tens of millions of dollars from its workers is also defending against a class-action lawsuit.
Glenn O. Hawbaker Inc. was sued in May by a former employee, whose attorneys wrote they could represent hundreds — if not thousands — of current and former employees in the lawsuit.
“While GOH boasted that it provided great employee benefits and used that supposed fact as a recruiting tool, in actuality, GOH was stealing its prevailing wage workers’ pension and health and welfare money,” attorney Mike Donovan wrote in the 73-page lawsuit.
The nearly 70-year-old company was charged in April with systematically violating state and prevailing wage laws on taxpayer-funded public infrastructure projects.
The state’s top prosecutor called it a “massive, unprecedented fraud” and the largest case of its kind nationally.
Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office accused the family-run business of stealing more than $20 million from workers’ fringe benefits — including retirement and health insurance — between 2015 and 2018.
Hawbaker, one of the largest employers in Centre County, used the money to increase its profits, undercut competitors and fund company bonuses, Shapiro said.
“We are unable to comment on the civil litigation other than to note that state and federal agencies repeatedly reviewed and audited our prevailing wage practices over the years and found that we were compliant,” the company wrote in a statement Monday. “The filing of this claim does not impact our efforts to work constructively with the attorney general’s office to reach a resolution.”
The company blamed bad advice from a former attorney for the decision to use prevailing wage fringe benefits money to pay benefits for all employees, including the owners and executives, investigators wrote in an affidavit of probable cause.
Hawbaker changed its prevailing wage practices in 2019 after a search at its corporate headquarters the prior year.
A pretrial conference for Hawbaker’s criminal case is scheduled for July 16. The company was charged with four felony counts of theft. The five-count lawsuit seeks a series of monetary compensation.
“The end goal is to collect the unpaid wages that Hawbaker stole from its hourly workers on prevailing wage projects,” Donovan said. “... These are hourly wage laborers and heavy machine operators, all of whom were promised prevailing wages and were deprived of their prevailing wage rates because of this scheme Hawbaker allegedly engaged in.”