More Illinois employers have become some of the latest targets of the growing list of class action lawsuits filed under Illinois’ biometrics information privacy law, accusing the companies of improperly requiring workers to scan their fingerprints to either track their work hours or access secure facilities, like medicine dispensers at hospitals.
From Feb. 18 to Feb. 24, the law firms of Fish Potter Bolaños, of Naperville, and Beaumont Costales, of Chicago, filed a combined six lawsuits in Cook County Circuit Court against eight different companies under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
All of the lawsuits generally accuse the companies of improperly requiring workers to scan their fingerprints to verify their identity when they punch the clock at the beginning and end of work shifts, or when accessing secure drug dispensing systems, before they first obtained written consent from the workers or supplied the workers with certain notices, allegedly required by the BIPA law, disclosing how the employers would collect, store, use, share and ultimately destroy the scanned fingerprint data.
The lawsuits seek damages on behalf of a large number of employees at each business.
The Fish firm filed the following lawsuits:
Tameka Little v Altitude Health Services, filed Feb. 18, over fingerprint scans on worker timeclocks; and
Pamela Readdy v Kindred THC Chicago LLC and Kindred Sycamore LLC, filed Feb. 24, over fingerprint scans required for workers to access the Pyxis medication dispensing system.
Beaumont Costales filed the following lawsuits, all over fingerprint scans on worker timeclocks, all filed Feb. 24:
Kyle Ziegler v HBS Management Corporation and GMP Chicago Inc.;
Erendida Alfaro v Congress Plaza Hotel LLC;
Manuel Marin v Wexford Home Corp.; and
Magdalena Sandoval v Vyse Gelatin.
The lawsuits arrive as just a few of an ever-growing roster of class action lawsuits against thousands of employers throughout Illinois under the BIPA law.
Under the BIPA law, plaintiffs are allowed to demand damages of $1,000-$5,000 per violation. Courts have interpreted the law to define individual violations as each instance in which someone’s biometrics are scanned. In employment cases, this could mean employers could be on the hook to pay up to $5,000 for each time an employee scanned a fingerprint in the workplace.
This could mean employers could face potential payouts well into the millions, if not billions of dollars, depending on the size of the company, among other factors, should an employer lose at trial.
The lawsuits have increasingly turned into settlements for plaintiffs’ lawyers, as employers have struggled to find effective defenses to either fight the allegations in court or, at least, reduce their potential payouts.
The Illinois Supreme Court has specifically declared plaintiffs do not need to prove they were actually harmed by improper collection or disclosure of their biometric data to press their potentially massive lawsuits.
More recently, the state high court and other Illinois judges have rejected efforts to classify workplace BIPA claims as workers’ compensation claims, which would send the cases to arbitration, and to limit how far in the past plaintiffs can claim damages. Plaintiffs believe they should be able to lodge claims on behalf of workers using a five year statute of limitations; defendants are seeking one- or two-year time limits. That question is still pending before the Illinois Supreme Court.
Illinois courts have also specifically declared that judges should not factor the potentially ruinous payouts faced by businesses when deciding the reach and scope of the BIPA law.