Walmart has been hit with a class action under Illinois biometrics privacy law, which accuses the world’s largest retailer of improperly recording and tracking the “voiceprints” of workers at its Illinois warehouses.
On July 2, attorneys with the firms of Carlson Lynch, of Chicago; The Grant Law Firm, of New York; and Kantrowitz Goldhamer & Graifman, of Montvale, N.J., filed suit against Walmart in Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago.
The complaint was filed on behalf of named plaintiff Andrew L. Barton, identified as an Illinois resident who worked at Walmart’s warehouse and distribution center in suburban Elwood from March 2019 to May 2021.
According to the complaint, Walmart requires workers at its warehouses – which it calls “fulfillment centers” – to record their voice using voice recognition software, which the complaint described “in some cases” as the “Vocollect system.”
Once the voice recognition system learns their voice, workers are required to communicate with the system as they move about the warehouse, pulling requested merchandise in response to customer orders.
“Through the headset they receive orders to fill and are required to respond into the headset telling it where they are in the warehouse, the product that they have just pulled from storage, the amount of that product that they have pulled, and the order that they are filling,” the complaint said.
The complaint concedes the system is in place to allow Walmart “to track its inventory in real time, and to avoid waste and employee theft.”
However, the complaint said, Walmart’s use of the voice recognition system for its Illinois workers violates the Illinois Biometric Information Protection Act (BIPA.)
Specifically, according to the complaint, Walmart allegedly violated the BIPA law by allegedly failing to first secure written authorization from workers before requiring them to scan their voiceprints.
Further, the complaint asserts, Walmart did not provide certain notices to workers, telling them how the company would use the scanned voice records, or how those voice scans would be saved, shared, or ultimately deleted from Walmart’s systems, as allegedly required by the BIPA law.
Enacted in 2008, the BIPA law has been used by plaintiffs’ lawyers in recent years to bring thousands of class action lawsuits in Cook County and other courts in Illinois and other states. The law is written ostensibly to help safeguard Illinois residents’ “unique permanent biometric identifiers,” such as fingerprints, facial geometry and retinal scans.
The law has been used to press huge class action lawsuits against Facebook and other tech giants.
However, the bulk of the lawsuits filed under BIPA have targeted employers of all sizes and types. Typically, such complaints, to date, have centered on those employers’ use of so-called biometric time clocks – devices which require workers to verify their identity by scanning a fingerprint when punching the clock at the beginning and end of work shifts – or other hand or finger scanners to restrict access to secure facilities, such as cash rooms at retail stores, drug closets at hospitals or freight rail yards.
Walmart recently agreed to settle a different class action brought under BIPA, over claims the company improperly required workers to scan a hand print to access rooms at the store where cash register drawers are swapped out.
Under the BIPA law, plaintiffs can request damages of $1,000-$5,000 per violation, with individual violations defined as each time a worker scans their biometric identifier.
Damages for such class actions could quickly climb into the many millions, if not billions, of dollars, should the case proceed to trial and a jury find for the plaintiffs.
To avoid such potentially massive damage awards, many employers targeted by such BIPA lawsuits have opted to settle in recent months.
Walmart, for instance, agreed to settle the cash register drawer room BIPA class action for $10 million. Lawyers for the plaintiffs in that case could claim one-third of the funds as attorney fees. More than 21,000 Walmart employees included in that class action could claim a cut of $460-$750, according to settlement documents.
It is not known how much many be at stake in the new class action against Walmart on behalf of its warehouse workers. The number of workers affected by the lawsuit could be significantly fewer, as Walmart operates just four “fulfillment centers” in Illinois, compared to 178 retail stores, according to the complaint.
However, the fulfillment center workers likely scanned their voiceprints many more times in a typical work shift than did workers who scanned their handprints to access cash rooms, potentially significantly increasing damage demands and risk for Walmart.
The complaint does not estimate how many workers may be involved in the class action, saying only they seek to expand the lawsuit to include any Walmart workers in Illinois whose voiceprints were scanned and saved by Walmart.
The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys Katrina Carroll and Nicholas R. Lange, of Carlson Lynch; Lynda J. Grant, of the Grant Firm; and Gary S. Graifman and Melissa R. Emert, of the Kantrowitz firm.