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A new federal ruling puts joint employer liability in the crosshairs – are your contracts at risk?
A federal court ruled that GardaWorld and JLL must face trial on security guard wage claims, putting joint-employer liability squarely in the spotlight.
On February 20, 2026, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., declined to throw out most of the wage claims brought by two security guards against their employer, GardaWorld, a global private security firm, and Jones Lang LaSalle Americas, JLL, a global commercial real estate and investment management company. The ruling sends the case to trial and carries real lessons for any HR team that relies on contractors, outsourced workers, or third-party staffing arrangements.
The two workers, Cesar Rivas and Enyis Velasquez, allege they were assigned to roles that qualified as security officer positions under D.C. law but were paid below the mandatory minimum wage for those roles. According to the plaintiffs, the required rate reached $24.19 per hour in combined wages and benefits from July 2023 through June 2024. GardaWorld, they claim, simply was not paying it.
Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that enough of their claims had merit to go before a jury, while drawing some clear lines about what the workers can and cannot recover.
One of those lines involves worker certification, and it matters a great deal for HR professionals managing licensed or credentialed workforces. The court ruled that Velasquez could not claim the security officer wage rate for the time she worked before she obtained her official security officer certification in November 2024. Under D.C. regulations, performing the job is not enough – a worker must also hold the credential. The uncomfortable twist is that D.C. law actually prohibits employers from deploying uncertified workers in these roles in the first place. GardaWorld allegedly did exactly that for years while also not paying the rates those roles require. It is a compliance trap that cuts in two directions at once.
Rivas, who had held his certification since 2018, faces no such limitation, and his claims move forward in full. The court found that their duties – monitoring building access, responding to trespassers and alarms, patrolling, and guarding entry points – are consistent with what D.C. law defines as security officer work, regardless of what GardaWorld chose to call their positions.
On overtime and benefits, the court split the difference. It agreed with GardaWorld that fringe benefit supplements – paid in cash rather than as traditional benefits – do not have to be paid for hours worked beyond 40 in a week, because the federal wage determination that D.C. law incorporates caps entitlement at 40 hours. However, it rejected the company’s argument that those same cash payments should be excluded from the formula used to calculate the overtime rate. That is a distinction with real payroll consequences, and one that employers who substitute cash for benefits should examine closely.
The joint-employer question is where the ruling is especially relevant for HR professionals. The court allowed the plaintiffs to pursue JLL as a joint employer – not because JLL directly hired them, but because of the degree of control JLL exercised over GardaWorld’s security staff at a building on New York Avenue in Washington. The contract between GardaWorld and JLL’s principal made JLL the sole and exclusive point of contact for communications regarding contract performance, and required GardaWorld to comply with rules and regulations set by JLL and to provide security services in accordance with policies and procedures established by JLL. That, the court found, is enough to submit the joint-employer question to a jury. For HR leaders at companies that manage third-party service providers on their properties, that reasoning deserves attention.
JLL’s exposure is limited to that one building, and only Rivas worked there across eleven recorded shifts. But the principle is broader than the facts of this case: the more control a client company exercises over how a contractor’s workers do their jobs, the greater the risk that a court will treat that client as a co-employer.
The defendants also pushed to pause the lawsuit while a related class action, involving similar claims against GardaWorld, worked its way through a different court. The judge declined. Rivas and Velasquez have been waiting more than two years for a resolution, and the court was not inclined to prolong their wait.
This is, notably, one of at least eighteen similar lawsuits filed against GardaWorld in D.C. federal courts over the same wage and classification issues. GardaWorld has opposed class certification in two parallel class actions and reportedly ignored a proposal from plaintiffs’ counsel to coordinate the many pending actions toward a prompt resolution. The court has ordered the case to proceed to trial on the surviving claims.
