Chief United States District Judge William L. Campbell Jr. ruled that the plaintiffs "sufficiently stated claims upon which relief may be granted" after reviewing the parties' briefs and the Second Amended Complaint.
The plaintiffs, all registered nurses, allege that NHC and its affiliates recruited hundreds of nurses from the Philippines to work at NHC facilities in the United States. The complaint accuses the defendants of underpaying the nurses and using restrictive contracts, threats of immigration consequences, and threatened litigation to prevent them from leaving their jobs. The contracts allegedly imposed penalties of $40,000 or more — often exceeding the nurses' annual net pay — if they stopped working for the defendants for any reason.
The defendants moved to dismiss under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), arguing the plaintiffs failed to state a claim upon which relief could be granted. The court rejected that argument, though the order did not address the claims individually, instead ruling in a single paragraph that the complaint as a whole survived the pleading standard.
The case includes claims under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Tennessee Human Trafficking Act, the Georgia RICO Act, the Virginia Overtime Wage Act, and state fraud and breach of contract theories.
The individual defendants are Jeffrey R. Smith, Maria Wong, Andrew Huckabay, and Rachel Kamau. The order denied all three pending motions.
The case will now proceed past the pleading stage in the Middle District of Tennessee.