Allied Universal Lawsuit 2021: EEOC, OFCCP, and DOJ Actions

The Allied Universal lawsuits and enforcement actions of 2021 clustered around three fronts: a $110,000 EEOC pregnancy discrimination settlement in March, a $1,175,000 OFCCP conciliation over racial and gender discrimination in December, and a $15 million Department of Justice antitrust penalty. The year also reshaped the company’s legal profile in a more lasting way, because in March 2021 Allied Universal closed its $5.28 billion acquisition of G4S and inherited that firm’s contracts, workforce, and pending liabilities.¹

The G4S Acquisition Reset the Legal Map

The G4S deal closed the week of March 17, 2021, for roughly $5.28 billion.¹ The merger made Allied Universal the largest private security company in North America, employing roughly 770,000 people across more than 100 countries under the Allied Universal brand domestically and the G4S brand abroad.²

It also meant Allied Universal took on G4S’s open contracts and its legal exposure. That exposure was not theoretical. In July 2021, a teenager was sexually assaulted by a male security worker at a G4S-staffed juvenile detention center in Palm Beach, Florida. A G4S supervisor later admitted in a deposition that the worker lacked the required law enforcement background and experience with delinquent youth, and that the facility was routinely understaffed in violation of the contract with the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice. The victim’s lawsuit settled in February 2023.³

EEOC Pregnancy Discrimination Settlement — March 2021

In March 2021, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced that U.S. Security Associates, operating as Allied Universal, had agreed to pay $110,000 to resolve a pregnancy discrimination lawsuit brought on behalf of a security guard in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The settlement was structured as a three-year consent decree, and it obligated the company to conduct training and file regular reports with the EEOC.⁴

OFCCP Racial and Gender Discrimination Finding — December 2021

December 2021 brought the year’s largest single discrimination resolution. The Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs announced that AlliedBarton Security Services had agreed to pay $1,175,000 in back wages and interest to 2,263 female, Black, and American Indian employees in New York City.⁵

The OFCCP found that AlliedBarton had discriminated against those workers by steering them into lower-paying job sites between 2012 and 2014. The conciliation agreement required the company to replace what investigators described as a “tap on the shoulder” placement method with a transparent system that notifies all security personnel of job-site openings. It also imposed three years of monitoring and annual compensation analyses.⁵

Department of Justice Antitrust Penalty

Separately in 2021, the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division assessed a $15 million penalty against Allied Universal for price-fixing or anti-competitive practices, according to the Good Jobs First Violation Tracker database.⁶ It was the year’s largest single federal financial penalty against the company.

What 2021 Did Not Resolve

The 2021 actions sat inside a much longer pattern of wage-and-hour claims that continued past the year. Allied Universal’s wage exposure has been the company’s single most costly legal category, with 152 wage-and-hour violations totaling roughly $180.7 million tracked by Good Jobs First.⁶ Most of those cases share one theory: that guards are paid for scheduled shift times rather than for hours they actually work, or that automatic meal-break deductions are taken from employees who never got the break.

Several of the largest wage settlements landed before 2021 but continued to shape the merged company’s liability picture. G4S Secure Solutions had agreed in 2019 to pay up to $130 million to settle a California class action alleging denial of meal and rest breaks to thousands of security officers. U.S. Security Associates paid $21 million in 2017 in a federal wage-and-hour case, and AlliedBarton paid $11 million in a similar 2016 federal action. In 2020, Hakeem v. Universal Protection Service settled California claims for $10 million, covering non-exempt employees who worked in the state from November 2017 through February 2020.⁷⁶

Federal wage enforcement kept coming after 2021 as well. In October 2023, the Department of Labor announced that Allied Universal would pay nearly $1.1 million — $549,947 in back wages plus an equal amount in liquidated damages — to 778 security employees assigned to Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, after investigators found the company had automatically deducted 45 minutes from each daily shift for meal breaks that guards were required to work through. The DOL added $50,000 in civil penalties and secured a nationwide compliance agreement. The DOL noted that in the five years leading up to that announcement, its Wage and Hour Division had investigated Allied Universal roughly 200 times nationwide and found Fair Labor Standards Act violations in most cases.⁸

Two federal class actions filed after 2021 test the same pay-scheme theory on a larger scale. James v. Universal Protection Service LLC (Case No. 22-cv-1668, S.D. Ill.) alleges that Allied Universal systematically underpaid approximately 27,000 Illinois security guards by compensating them for scheduled hours rather than actual hours worked, and by failing to pay for pre-shift and post-shift duties. The company entered mediation in April 2023.³ Sears v. Universal Protection Service, LLC d/b/a Allied Universal Security Services was filed in May 2023 in the Southern District of Indiana on behalf of hourly-paid guards making the same “scheduled time versus actual time” allegations.⁹

Allied Universal CEO Steve Jones has defended the company’s record, saying guards had “administered life-saving medical aid, extinguished fires, foiled human trafficking, prevented suicides and removed firearms.” The company said it enforces “rigorous pre-hire background screening” and protocols that “frequently exceed government and industry standards.”³

1
Security Systems News. Allied Universal Finalizes G4S Deal After Buyout Saga
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Allied Universal Newsroom. About Us
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TIME. Allied Universal Security Problems
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EEOC. Allied Universal to Pay $110,000 to Settle EEOC Pregnancy Discrimination Lawsuit
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U.S. Department of Labor. OFCCP News Release
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Good Jobs First Violation Tracker. Allied Universal Security Services
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CPT Group Case Info. Hakeem v. Universal Protection Service Settlement Agreement
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U.S. Department of Labor. WHD News Release
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Indiana Wage Law. Sears v. Universal Protection Service