Get Fresh Produce, a food service distributor, has been hit with a class action lawsuit for allegedly violating Illinois' biometrics privacy law. The suit accuses the company of improperly requiring workers to scan their fingerprints when clocking in and out of work.
The plaintiff, Erick Gonzalo Tronco Gonzalez, filed the suit on behalf of himself and other similarly situated employees. The lawsuit was filed by attorneys Daniel I. Schlade and James M. Dore, of Justicia Laboral LLC, of Chicago, in Cook County Circuit Court.
The complaint alleges that Get Fresh Produce's actions constitute willful violations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). It seeks redress for these alleged violations and aims to obtain compensation for those affected by the company's conduct.
Under BIPA, companies can legally use biometric systems if they inform individuals in writing that their biometric information will be collected or stored, disclose the specific purpose and duration for which this information will be used, receive written consent from individuals whose biometrics are being collected, and publish publicly available guidelines for permanently destroying biometric identifiers and information.
Employers of all types and sizes operating in Illinois have been targeted by thousands of BIPA-related class actions in courts in Chicago and elsewhere in the state. The lawsuits typically seek potential payouts worth many millions of dollars, allegedly on behalf of workers who were required to scan their fingerprints or other biometrics to verify their identity when punching the clock or when accessing secured areas in a workplace.
Under the law, plaintiffs are allowed to demand damages of $1,000-$5,000 per violation. The Illinois Supreme Court has defined "individual violations" as each time a worker scans their fingerprint over a span of five years before filing suit. When multiplied across entire workforces punching a timeclock multiple times per day, such potential damage awards could be "annihilative," some judges have observed.
Since they first began to appear in Illinois courts about nine years ago, 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.