Diamond Waste & Recycling, a Chicago-based trash collection company, is facing a class-action lawsuit over the way it has required workers to scan their fingerprints when punching in and out of work shifts.
On Dec. 22, attorneys James Dore and Daniel Schlade, of the firm of Justicia Laboral, of Chicago, filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court against Diamond Waste. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of named plaintiff Jose R. Herrera, identified only as someone who allegedly worked for Diamond Waste in the past five years.
The lawsuit takes aim at Diamond Waste under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).
The lawsuit claims that Diamond Waste collected and used employee fingerprint scans without proper consent or safeguards in place, or without providing proper notices allegedly required by the law.
The lawsuit accuses Diamond Waste of willfully violating BIPA regulations, which allegedly require companies to inform individuals in writing before collecting their biometric data, specify the purpose and duration of its use, obtain written consent for its collection and usage, and publish guidelines for permanently destroying the data.
The potential payout from Diamond Waste could be large.
The plaintiffs are seeking to expand the action to a class of additional plaintiffs which could include everyone who has worked for Diamond Waste for the past five years. They are seeking damages of $1,000-$5,000 per alleged violation, as allowed under BIPA.
The lawsuit and its demands follow a pattern set by thousands of similar class actions filed against Illinois employers in the past eight years under the BIPA law. Those lawsuits have resulted in a litany of multi-million dollar settlements, and hundreds of millions of dollars in collective attorney fees paid to class action lawyers who file the suits, thanks in large part to a series of Illinois Supreme Court decisions which have interpreted the law in ways that have left most employers largely defenseless against such legal claims.
Notably, the state high court has declared plaintiffs don't need to prove they were actually harmed by the biometric scans, and the court has defined "individual violations" as each time a worker scans their fingerprint over a span of five years before the filing of a lawsuit. When multiplied across entire workforces punching a timeclock multiple times per day, such potential damage awards could be "annihilative," some judges have observed.
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