If you are an hourly employee, you are gonna want to hear. This is huge. Providence Health and services in Washington State just lost a massive class action lawsuit against 33 hundred employees. They have been ordered to pay $200 million for illegal timekeeping and wage theft. This is easily top 5 questions that I get on a daily basis from healthcare workers about not getting paid for breaks that you never took, and rounding of the time clock. That’s what this is all about.
The lawsuit alleged that over 230,400,000 hours went unpaid to employees over a five year period from 2018 to 2023. 3 the, it’s broken down into two parts. So the first one is the rounding policy. If you’re a nurse healthcare worker, if you work in a hospital, you are so familiar with this. So they round up or down in 15 minute increments, right? So, you know, you clock in at 6:53, but they don’t start paying you until 7:00am and you’re there essentially on the clock, probably working that whole time. These things add up, right? And the jury found that it was disproportionately in favor of Providence, meaning it never rounded in the employee’s favor. Rarely. Right. No one shocked to hear that. And so the jury awarded $9.3 million for that alone.
The second half has to do with unpaid breaks. So the jury found that Providence Health and services fail to not only provide the legally required breaks, but then fail to compensate for the breaks. So Washington state law requires that anything over a 10 hour shift, those employees be provided to 30 minute breaks. But that Providence, their system, their policies denied the extra break in those situations kind of across the board. And then the breaks were automatically deducted anyway. And so for that, the jury awarded $90.3 million. But I wanna point something out that’s important here. The jury noted because some of the employees knowingly agreed to waive their second break, the jury deducted over $1 million from the award. Don’t agree to what you know is wrong and unlawful. So it gets even better.
Because Providence violations were found to be willful according to state law, the total award had to be doubled, resulting in a 200 million dollar award to these over 33 hundred employees. There it is. There’s a precedent.
You guys ask about this all the time. The reason that healthcare organizations get away with wage theft is because the vast majority of you never report it. You never contact the labor board. You never formally report it. You have got to report it. These are not quick, easy fixes. These things, as you can tell, go on for years. But look what happens when you actually report things, when you actually fight back. You all need to be reporting and documenting any unpaid breaks that you didn’t take, that you’re, they’re deducting money from any of the rounding up. I mean, you have to check within your individual state laws. But be documenting this and be reporting this and bring a class action lawsuit. Like it only takes two people to start the process. Go see attorneys. They will usually do these on contingency. And then they will be reaching out to other employees. You don’t have to come with the 3,300 employees. You know, you only need two of you to get the ball rolling. And if and when you’re approached to be part of a potential class action lawsuit where you work, sign it. This is huge.