A federal judge has ruled that nearly 350 former employees of a Washington County compressor manufacturer that closed in 2018 are together due about $2.4 million in severance pay and interest.
The Jan. 17 ruling is in addition to a November 2021 judgment in which Senior U.S. District Judge James Jones ordered Bristol Compressors International to pay $1.4 million in back wages to approximately 130 of those former employees after he ruled that the company violated the federal WARN Act, which requires employers to provide 60 days’ written notice of mass layoffs and closures.
Bristol Compressors International — which made compressors for refrigeration units, air conditioners and heating systems — employed 468 people at the Washington County plant on July 31, 2018, when it announced it would shut down and when it began terminating employees, according to court documents. The company had been operating there for more than 40 years.
The facility ultimately closed for good in November 2018. Soon after, Thailand-based Kulthorn Kirby Public Co. Ltd. bought the company’s intellectual property and equipment and moved the operations to Bangkok.
“It always makes me angry when hard-working people are treated unfairly by employers,” said Mary Lynn Tate, an Abingdon lawyer who handled the class-action lawsuit against Bristol Compressors International and New York-based equity firm Garrison Investment Group LP, which owned the Washington County company when the closure was announced. “The employees in this class were committed, and most had worked at this company for a great part of their work lives, and some [for] all of it.”
With the judge’s ruling in hand, Tate said she plans to file a collection action “very soon” against Garrison Investment Group.
The two judgments total about $3.8 million. Tate said each employee will receive an average of about $10,000, which includes interest accrued while the case was pending.
The group of employees who won the $2.4 million judgment for severance pay includes the workers awarded the $1.4 million judgment for WARN Act violations, plus other employees who accepted bonuses to continue working after the closure announcement and waived certain rights, including their rights under the WARN Act, according to court documents.
Not all 468 employees who were employed at the plant when the closure was announced were part of the lawsuit, for reasons including having voluntarily quit or retired.
Representatives with Garrison Investment Group could not be reached for comment Friday. The company’s website appears inactive, a phone number listed on an archived copy of the website from 2022 is no longer in service and a message sent to a corporate email address was not returned.
Nonetheless, Garrison Investment Group remains an active registered company with Virginia’s State Corporation Commission.
Bristol Compressors International and Garrison Investment Group argued that the compressor maker was exempt from the WARN Act’s 60-day notice rule because the company’s business circumstances were not foreseeable and because it was actively seeking capital that would forestall the closure — both of which are potential exceptions to the act’s requirements.
They also argued that employees were not entitled to severance pay because Bristol Compressors International terminated its severance plan before the closure announcement.
Jones’ November 2021 ruling that the company violated the WARN Act followed a July 2021 bench trial in which no attorneys appeared in federal court in Abingdon to defend the company against the suit.
According to court records, the company has not been represented by counsel since September 2020, when its attorney at that time withdrew from the case.
Jones had ruled in the company’s favor regarding severance pay in March 2020. In December 2021, Tate appealed that ruling, arguing that Bristol Compressors International’s board of directors approved terminating the company’s severance pay plan but that the company never actually completed the steps to do so.
This past April, the Richmond-based U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, finding that the company had not terminated the severance plan in writing as required by law.
The appeals court vacated that part of Jones’ ruling and sent the case back to the district court. Jones then awarded the severance pay following a court hearing this month.