The owners of the Marriott Chicago O'Hare have become one of the latest Illinois employers hit with a class action under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
On Feb. 11, attorneys Megan Shannon, James B. Zouras and others with the firm of Stephan Zouras, of Chicago, filed a class action complaint in Cook County Circuit Court against hotel and hospitality management company Columbia Sussex Management LLC.
According to the complaint, a class of current and former Columbia Sussex employees, represented by named plaintiff, former Marriott Chicago O'Hare employee Katarzyna Gniecki, are asking the court to declare the company violated BIPA and order the company pay potentially steep damages.
The suit alleges that the hotel operator violated the BIPA law by disclosing its employees' fingerprints, which are required for timekeeping, to at least one third-party vendor for storage in a data center without informing or obtaining consent from the employees.
The company is also accused of failing to obtain written releases from its employees before requiring the employees to scan their fingerprints on so-called biometric timeclocks when beginning and ending work shifts, and of not publishing a publicly available policy for retention and destruction of biometric data once employment is terminated.
The class may be awarded damages of $1,000 for each negligent violation of BIPA and $5,000 for reckless or intentional violations. Under other BIPA proceedings, individual violations have been defined as each time an employee scans their fingerprints.