Automatic Meal-Break Deductions

Good news if your facility automatically subtracts meal breaks from your staff's compensated hours: Two recent federal court rulings have denied class action status to hospital workers who contended that automatic meal-break deductions might be in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act and that they were due back pay. Without class action status, employees would be forced to bring individual lawsuits, which would probably render litigation ineffective.

Healthcare workers nationwide were particularly upset that the automatic deductions for meal breaks occurred during training time and even when circumstances forced them to work through the break period.

Some healthcare attorneys consider 2 recent federal court rulings involving the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and West Penn Allegheny health systems in Pittsburgh as a major setback for the meal break lawsuits

The main issue in these cases is compliance with the FLSA. In researching the Pittsburgh cases in preparation for trial, both federal judges said could they could not find many examples of withholding payments for work done in meal breaks. In the UPMC case, for example, the judge found most employees had been trained on meal-break cancellation policies and they were not being discouraged from reporting work. "The named plaintiffs themselves admit to having been trained on and/or were aware of how to cancel meal break deductions," the judge wrote, adding that plaintiffs "failed to identify opt-in member(s) who were dissuaded from cancelling, or instructed not to cancel, deductions for meal breaks."

The judge found that because UPMC entities had a variety of different policies on automatic deductions, one single class action suit would not be applicable. "The breadth of these disparate factual and employment settings seems self-apparent," she wrote. "There are far too many individualized inquiries to be addressed through representative testimony, bifurcation and sub-classifications."

Justin M. Cordello, an attorney for the plaintiffs in both cases, says his clients will appeal the UPMC decision and are considering an appeal of the West Penn Allegheny decision. He says the decisions represent the first denial of class action status for a raft of such cases nationwide, none of which have gone to trial yet. A similar case in Syracuse, N.Y., he adds, has already been granted class action status and similar lawsuits with other systems, including University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia and the Care Group Healthcare System in Boston, have been settled without going to trial.

Mr. Cordello says the automatic deduction policy is not a good fit for health care because workers are constantly being called back to work during meal breaks. He adds that making it easy for employees to report work is not a good a good solution for the problem, because employees may be under too much pressure to keep work claims to a minimum. The best solution, he says, is simply to pay employees for all meal breaks, but this rarely happens because hospitals think it costs too much. John J. Myers and Mariah L. Lewis, attorneys for UPMC, did not respond to requests for comment.

Leigh Page