A class action lawsuit has been lodged against Talerico Martin Retail Bakery, accusing the Summit-based retail baked goods company of allegedly wrongly requiring workers to scan fingerprints when punching the clock, allegedly violating Illinois' biometrics privacy law.
The plaintiff, Socorro Alvarez Leon, represented by attorneys Daniel I. Schlade and James M. Dore of Justicia Laboral LLC, alleges that the company did not inform employees about the collection and storage of their biometric data nor obtain their written consent before requiring them to scan their fingerprints at the beginning and end of each work shift, or when taking unpaid breaks. The lawsuit asserts the company's alleged conduct violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA.)
Plaintiffs are seeking to expand the action to include potentially everyone who worked for Talerico Martin since July 2019. The complaint does not estimate how many people that may include.
The potential payout from Talerico Martin could be large.
Plaintiffs 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.
The case against Talerico Martin was filed in Cook County Circuit Court on Jan. 26.