A class action lawsuit has been filed against Pearl Healthcare Management, LLC, a group of nursing homes in the Chicago area.
The suit alleges that the company violated Illinois' biometrics privacy law by improperly requiring workers to scan their fingerprints when clocking in and out of work.
The plaintiff, Corrina Kreger, accuses Pearl Healthcare of unlawfully collecting, using, storing, and disclosing her sensitive biometric data without proper consent or adequate protective measures. The lawsuit asserts Pearl's actions allegedly violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA.)
According to the complaint, Kreger worked for Pearl as a Housekeeping and Laundry Manager Supervisor from January 2022 to March 2023 at Pearl's Crystal Lake facility.
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 lawsuit was filed on Feb. 28 in Cook County Circuit Court.
Plaintiffs are represented in the action by attorneys Ryan F. Stephan and Danielle M. Sweet, of Stephan Zouras, of Chicago.