Months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ruling on individual arbitration clauses, employees at Epic are continuing their fight for overtime wages, according to a WKOW report.
Epic's quality assurance workers and technical writers filed two separate class-action lawsuits, alleging the EHR giant failed to pay them for overtime work. The Court took up the lawsuit involving the technical writers and ruled in May that groups of workers could not collectively bring their overtime claims to court. Instead, employees who signed arbitration agreements must file these disputes individually.
The ongoing cases involve about 1,500 salaried employees dating back to 2012 who allege they were not paid for overtime work. Many who filed the latest claims still work for Epic but hundreds have likely left the company, Breanne Snapp, the attorney representing the workers, told WKOW.
"Instead of the cases being resolved efficiently in one class action trial, we may have a thousand arbitrations instead", Ms. Snapp said. "Workers have begun filing unpaid overtime claims individually, some going back to 2015, but none have yet been paid."
The EHR vendor is paying for the arbitration and most of the filing fees, the report states. Epic previously paid out a $5.4 million settlement to resolve a similar case involving workers in 2014.