Two months after it settled a federal lawsuit that alleged it had deceived 10 Massachusetts residents who had purchased cleaning franchises from it, Coverall North America Inc. was the target of another suit in US District Court yesterday that contended it had failed to provide a Lowell man with sufficient business as it allegedly pledged it would in getting him to purchase a franchise .
Pius Awuah, 33, said in the suit that he agreed to pay Coverall $14,000 for a franchise in 2005 in exchange for its promise to provide him with $3,000 a month in commercial building cleaning business. However, Awuah said Coverall provided him typically with less than $1,300 a month .
“I kept on complaining that I was not getting as much business as they had promised but they kept telling me to wait, that it’d get better but it never did so I gave it up,” Awuah said.
Like Awuah, an immigrant from Ghana who has been a US citizen for a decade, the 10 others who had made similar allegations against Coverall in a 2005 suit had also recently arrived in the United States. Shannon Liss-Riordan, attorney for Awuah and the 10 others, said that Coverall focuses its marketing campaign on such newcomers to the United States because they are easily persuaded by the company’s representations.
“Upon information and belief, Coverall targets individuals with limited fluency in English because they are easily victimized by Coverall’s misrepresentations and other systemic legal violations,” Liss-Riordan alleged in Awuah’s complaint. “Even the workers who do speak English often cannot understand the highly technical and confusing language in the form franchise agreement.
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