A MAGA billionaire vowing to create record jobs if he becomes Georgia’s next governor has come under fire over multi-million-dollar payments his companies made to settle claims that they exploited workers and breached labor laws.
Health executive-turned-Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson has pitched himself as someone who can boost jobs and the economy, with Donald Trump even attributing his electoral success so far to his business acumen and MAGA views.
“Congratulations to Rick Jackson, who very successfully campaigned on being ‘TRUMP’, and won,” the president said after Jackson won his GOP primary run-off in June.
“He will be your next Governor of Georgia. Can’t wait!”
But documents show that at least two companies within Jackson’s health empire agreed to class action settlements over claims they failed to properly pay thousands of workers.
The Daily Beast can reveal that one of those companies agreed to pay nearly $2 million to nursing staff after being accused of failing to pay overtime and other wages owed.
Last month, CNN also revealed that another Jackson Healthcare company agreed to a $3 million settlement against foreign-born nurses who accused it of exploiting the very immigrant workers it recruited to the U.S.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Jackson’s campaign for comment.
News of the $5 million in payouts comes as the battle for Georgia heats up on multiple fronts ahead of November’s midterm elections.
At the Senate level, Democratic firebrand Jon Ossoff—who recently made headlines by invoking the bizarre relationship between Trump and White House aide Natalie Harp—has edged out in front of his GOP rival, Mike Collins.
Collins has been plagued by scandals involving his staff and family. As Ossoff’s star continues to rise, some Republican leaders in Georgia are conceding that the Senate race has already been lost.
But the gubernatorial race between Jackson and former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is much tighter, raising the stakes in a state that has not elected a Democrat governor since 1998.
An August InsiderAdvantage poll found the Republican nominee with 46.3 percent support and Bottoms with 46.2 percent among likely voters surveyed.
Jackson’s campaign depicts him as a “conservative outsider” who went from a modest upbringing to become a healthcare titan with his Jackson Healthcare empire.
In a post on X, Jackson also vowed to “create more jobs than have ever been created in the history of Georgia”. He also said that he would bring “business solutions to Georgia just like President Trump has for the United States—with a Southern tone.”
“I have built a $3 billion business without any outside financial help, and when you know how to do stuff like that, you can do a lot of things to solve problems, and that’s what I plan to do all over the state,” he said in April.
But in 2022, Jackson Nurse Professionals, a travel nursing staffing company that is part of Jackson Healthcare, agreed to settle a 2017 class action from workers accusing the company of failing to properly pay their overtime, bonuses, and wages owed when they left their jobs.
The settlement of almost $2 million covered about 300 workers. A separate $3 million settlement involving another subsidiary, Avante Healthcare Professionals, covered more than 5,000 current and former international workers.
The settlements resolved the workers’ claims without finding that Jackson personally violated labor laws, but they are nonetheless awkward given his campaign pitch.
It is also not the first time the MAGA billionaire has come under scrutiny.
In June, a bombshell recording captured him apparently agreeing that women should have to “prove” they were raped in order to qualify for an abortion.
The recording was made at a campaign event and showed the healthcare executive discussing abortion with a voter who objected to exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape. But his campaign pushed back strongly on characterizations of the comments, accusing critics of distorting his position.
