A former worker has delivered a class action lawsuit against Trader Joe’s, as he and his lawyers seek to bag a judgment against the supermarket chain for allegedly violating Illinois’ biometrics privacy law by making employees scan their eyes and facial geometry when punching the clock.
On April 29, attorney Lorrie T. Peters and others with the firm of Caffarelli & Associates, of Chicago, filed the class action complaint against the company known as Trader Joe’s East Inc. and staffing company Workforce Enterprises.
They filed suit on behalf of named plaintiff Derrick Barnes, identified in the lawsuit as a Cook County resident who was assigned by Workforce Enterprises to work at Trader Joe’s distribution center in Minooka. According to the complaint, Barnes worked for Trader Joe’s from October 2019 to January 2020.
The lawsuit alleges Trader Joe’s and Workforce must pay a potentially huge sum of money for allegedly requiring workers to submit to digital scans of their face and eyes to verify their identity when using Trader Joe’s so-called biometric punch clocks. The company allegedly uses the devices to track employees’ work hours for payroll.
However, the lawsuit asserts the companies neither secured permission from employees nor provided workers with legally required notices concerning why the companies were collecting the scanned biometric identifiers, or how the data would stored, shared and ultimately destroyed.
The complaint asserts these alleged actions violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).
The plaintiffs seek to expand the lawsuit to include a class of potentially everyone who worked for Trader Joe’s in the past five years and were required to scan their facial geometry or eyes to punch in and out of work shifts.
According to its website, Trader Joe’s operates supermarkets in 17 Illinois communities, and one distribution center warehouse in Illinois, in Minooka.
The complaint seeks damages of $1,000-$5,000 per violation, as allowed under the BIPA law. In other BIPA-related proceedings, attorneys for both plaintiffs and defendants have agreed the law in such cases could be interpreted to define a violation as each time an employee scans a biometric identifier, such as fingerprint or facial scan, to begin or end a work shift, or access secure or sensitive equipment or areas in a workplace.
Spread over an entire workforce, damages could quickly soar into the many millions of dollars or perhaps even billions, depending on the size of the company.
Employers of all sizes and types, across Illinois, have been hit with hundreds of similar class actions in recent months and years, as plaintiffs allege biometric scans at employee punch clocks can violate the BIPA law.