Unpaid Wages Lawsuit Alleges Physicians Assistant was Shorted Overtime Pay

Cook County Health and Hospitals Systems is facing an unpaid wages lawsuit from an Illinois physicians assistant alleging she was not paid for all hours worked. The unpaid wages lawsuit alleges she was regularly required to work overtime on a regular basis but was not properly compensated for these extra hours.

Plaintiff Tiffany D. filed this unpaid wages lawsuit after Cook County Health and Hospitals Systems allegedly failed to compensate her for missing wages lost from unpaid overtime rates.

Tiffany is employed for the county as a physicians assistant at the Primary Care Clinic and Immediate Care Clinic. She says she was regularly assigned a high quantity of patients between late 2015 and June 2017.

Tiffany alleges she was regularly assigned more patients just as her shift was about to end, and was reportedly required to work with patients with little to no assistance from other medical staff. This forced Tiffany to regularly monitor patients until they were discharged from Immediate Care or transferred to hospital, before she could clock out of her shift.

Overview of Unpaid Wages Lawsuit

Tiffany’s unpaid wages lawsuit alleges she was forced to work four hours of overtime each week between late 2015 and 2017 to monitor the health and safety of the patients. Before filing this unpaid wages lawsuit, Tiffany had reportedly made frequent complaints about the heavy workload of patients to her employers and had tried to claim her unpaid overtime.

Instead of paying her overtime or provide necessary assistance, she claims, Cook County Health and Hospitals Systems had allegedly changed the times sheets and time entries so that it would show she only worked eight hours a day. She claims the healthcare provider did this to avoid paying her overtime, with the missing data entries of her work hours showing she worked over eight hours in May, June, and July of 2017.

Tiffany’s unpaid wages lawsuit points out that Cook County Health and Hospitals Systems had previously acknowledged that was illegal to not pay for overtime for the hours worked when she worked over eight hours a day or 40 hours a week.

Under federal labor laws, non-exempt employees must be paid the overtime rate of one-and-a-half times their hourly rate if the employee works over 40 hours in a single work week. This also applies if the employee works over eight hours in a single work day, which Tiffany says she regularly did.

Even with this acknowledgment, the healthcare provider allegedly manipulated her time cards so that it would not accurately reflect all hours worked.

Tiffany’s unpaid wages lawsuit alleges various violations against the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which protects employees from unfair compensation practices. This includes holding employers accountable for any missing wages owed to their employees, with regulators requiring sufficient pay records going back for at least several years.

According to her unpaid wages lawsuit, Tiffany was paid an hourly rate of $57.77 and is owed overtime between 2015 to June 2017. Tiffany is filing this unpaid wages lawsuit seeking compensation for all missing overtime and hours worked.

This Unpaid Wages Lawsuit is Case No. 1:17-cv-07401, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.

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