Pressure On The Wound
As if health care costs don’t get enough attention, earlier this month, a bus carrying a 14-attorney law firm from Rochester, N.Y., came chasing an ambulance across the Massachusetts border to demonstrate one of the many ways those costs get to be so high.
The firm is filing a class action lawsuit claiming that Massachusetts hospitals, including those in the UMass Memorial Health Care Inc. system, failed to pay employees who work through unpaid lunch periods.
This isn’t medical malpractice, or prescription drug costs or Medicare reimbursement, here. But it’s nonetheless worrying both hospitals and businesses in Massachusetts that have watched as their health care costs have risen to beyond their reach.
Thomas & Solomon says 107 current and former UMass employees have signed onto the suit. The UMass system employs about 13,000 at five facilities.
Legally Lucrative
The low numbers of employees signing onto the suit show that the vast majority of hospital workers realize that lunch breaks, though specifically provided for by federal labor law, are in practice, an employee’s responsibility.
Still, the stakes are high. In 2006, the University of Rochester paid $9 million to employees in an identical suit. In 2008, the firm also sued other hospitals in Upstate New York and Pittsburgh.
In “client testimonials” provided by Thomas & Solomon, some nurses argue that “the hospital’s policy is not to ensure that we actually aren’t working.” Federal labor law does require that employers ensure that employees are taking their meal breaks without interruption. The law recognizes that health care workers are likely to be “frequently interrupted” during lunch breaks and says employees “should be paid for the full 30 minutes” when breaks are spent working.
What Thomas & Solomon has stumbled upon is a situation that is practically untenable for hospitals and astoundingly lucrative for the firm and those who sign onto these lawsuits.
If hospital employees are so busy that they can’t say, “I’m going on break,” then how can hospital administrators be expected to account for whether every employee has put work aside for exactly 30 minutes?
We suspect that many hospitals have in place processes and procedures similar to those used by UMass that expose class action suits like this for the gratuitous money grabs that they are. UMass uses auditing procedures to ensure that its employees are paid properly.
Employees that think they’ve been paid improperly or have questions about their pay are encouraged to contact hospital administration directly or through their respective unions, effectively canceling out any meaningful accumulation of disputed pay hours.
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