BUILDING & CONSTRUCTION TRADES UNIONS
FILE SEC COMPLAINT
AGAINST LABOR READY, INC.

Washington, DC - Attorneys for the Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD), AFL-CIO, have filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charging one of the nation's biggest temporary employment agencies with making "seriously misleading statements" to the SEC and to investors in the publicly-held company.

The complaint alleges that Labor Ready, Inc. (NYSE: LRW) - which operates 839 offices in 49 states, Puerto Rico, Canada and the United Kingdom - has continually reported that its "more mature" offices are showing increased revenues, when exactly the opposite may be true.

"The company has repeatedly claimed in its 10Qs and 10Ks (SEC reports) that it had continued increases in revenues from mature dispatch offices," the complaint says. "However, admissions to the contrary were made by the company's Chief Financial Officer Joe Sambataro in an investors Internet conference call on 6/22/00 and 7/19/00."

The complaint cites transcripts of Sambataro saying that sales at offices three years and older have "declined year over year by five percent" while sales at offices open two years or less have grown at 10 percent, and two years older at only 1.4 percent.

"It [Labor Ready] has continuously announced in 10K filings and elsewhere that a key element of its strategy is to increase its number of offices, claiming the temporary help industry was fragmented, but economies of scale were available," the complaint says. This previously unmentioned data, the Sambataro statement, "indicates that maturation of offices actually means their sales decline - the exact opposite of the impression given by the company's previous 10Ks and 10Qs."

The complaint, which was filed on August 10^th by attorneys Richard G. McCracken and Andrew J. Kahn of San Francisco-based Davis, Cowell & Bowe, asks the SEC to require the company to file amended 10Ks and 10Qs, to provide corrective information to its investors "by means reasonably calculated to reach all existing and potential investors, and to "make whole" investors who bought stock in reliance upon the misleading statements.

On July 6, attorneys for the BCTD demanded that Labor Ready CEO and President Richard L. King explain to investors whether the company ha made payments and is obligated in the future to a former CEO, his son and an associate who invented the lucrative cash dispensing machines used by the company. So far, there has been no reply. Earlier in the month, the BCTD announced its support for a class-action lawsuit filed against Labor Ready in Georgia for allegedly illegally charging employees for using the machines.

The Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD), AFL-CIO is the umbrella organization for 15 international building and construction trades unions in the United States and Canada, representing a total of 1.5 million members in the construction industry. In April, the unions launched a campaign called "Temp Workers Deserve a Permanent Voice @ Work" to shed light on abuses of temp agency workers in the construction industry.

August 11, 2000 Press Release from the Building and Construction Trades Department.