Interesting Post on the Increasing Use of RICO in Illegal Hire Cases

Overlawyered has the details (through the Stromata blog). 

Tom Veal, over at Stromata, is concerned that RICO is being used in employment cases in ways that it was never intended to be used. He asserts:

There’s nothing wrong, needless to say, with representing clients and being paid for it. What is wrong is working systematically to unbalance the scales of justice, as the organized plaintiffs’ bar (not every single plaintiff’s lawyer, of course) has been doing for the past several decades.

RICO, which Mark Krikorian is so delighted to see invoked against American businessmen, originated as a device for bankrupting organized crime through huge damage awards to its victims. In that objective, it has been an utter failure. It has now metastasized into a incentive for lawsuits that give risible compensation to those who have allegedly been wronged and outsize fees to their attorneys.

The Yakima case noted above – $65 each to the plaintiff class [of fruit pickers in Yakima County, Washington), probably a quarter million or so to their self-appointed “advocates” – is merely an all-too-typical instance.

I would be interested to hear readers' comments on the increasing use of RICO in the employment law area.

PS