Dive Brief:
- The MetroHealth System must face claims alleging it illegally rounded workers’ hours, a judge ruled Nov. 24 (Bowman v. MetroHealth).
- A medical practice assistant alleged in the proposed class-action lawsuit that the Cleveland-based health system failed to pay her — and other similarly situated employees — for all hours worked because of its “time editing” or “rounding” practices and policies, in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Ohio Minimum Fair Wage Standards Act. The system allegedly “rounded and edited clock-in and clock-out times which resulted in Plaintiff and others performing their ‘principal activities of their jobs’ without compensation.”
- MetroHealth asked the court to dismiss the case in its entirety, which Judge Bridget Meehan Brennan declined to do on all but one count. MetroHealth declined to comment on the ruling.
Dive Insight:
The plaintiff alleged that the timekeeping policy is ‘“rigged’ in MetroHealth’s favor and was designed to willfully pay less time than worked,” which also led to “shortchanged eligibility for overtime pay.”
Per the policy, workers can clock-in at the start of a shift up to six minutes early; however, those six minutes are rounded forward, and the employee starts being paid at the beginning of a shift. At the end of a shift, if a worker swipes out one to three minutes early, those minutes are rounded back to the end of the shift; if a swipe occurs four to six minutes early, “there is a .10 reduction of time recorded and an employees’ pay is reduced accordingly.”
In its motion to dismiss, MetroHealth argued that the plaintiff failed “to state any claims upon which relief may be granted.” The health system said the complaint “does not properly allege what compensable work Plaintiff (or the thousands of others she seeks to represent) performed during the time in question.”
However, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Eastern Division, judge ruled that the plaintiff did plead compensable work activities because “she immediately began performing her work duties, which she was hired to perform, upon clocking in” and that the lawsuit should proceed.