Five current and former security officers at Lehigh Valley Hospital-Schuylkill have sued Lehigh Valley Health Network, claiming the hospital system routinely failed to pay them for lunch breaks they worked through and altered their timecards to avoid paying overtime.
The lawsuit was filed July 14 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. It names Cheryl Groshko, Brandon Santee, David Weikel, Jeffrey Moyer, and Eric Brown as plaintiffs, all of whom work or worked as security officers at Lehigh Valley Hospital-Schuylkill’s East Norwegian Street and South Jackson Street campuses in Pottsville. Groshko, Santee, Weikel and Brown are still employed there. Moyer no longer works for the hospital.
The suit accuses Lehigh Valley Health Network Inc. and Lehigh Valley Hospital-Schuylkill of violating the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and Pennsylvania’s Wage Payment and Collection Law. The plaintiffs are asking a jury to award them back pay, an equal amount in liquidated damages, and attorneys’ fees.
A spokesperson for LVHN told Coal Region Canary the hospital does not comment on pending or active litigation.
According to the complaint, hourly employees at the Schuylkill campuses were given a 30-minute lunch break each shift but were told by their supervisors that they could not leave the building during that time. The suit says employees were required to carry their work-issued cell phones and radios and remain ready to answer calls, meaning they were never truly off duty during their break.
The lawsuit says employees had to log electronically whether they took an uninterrupted 30-minute lunch. Even when workers indicated they had not gotten an uninterrupted break, the suit alleges, supervisors sometimes changed that answer or pressured employees to say they had taken the break anyway. The plaintiffs say this happened even when supervisors knew the employees had not actually stepped away from work.
Because of this, the lawsuit claims, the security officers lost about two to two and a half unpaid hours of work every week.
The complaint also alleges that managers manually altered clock-in and clock-out times to erase overtime. Employees say that when they clocked out after their shift’s scheduled end time because they were finishing a task or call, their recorded time was later changed back to match their scheduled shift, wiping out the extra hours. The plaintiffs say they discovered these changes because an asterisk appears next to any time that has been manually edited on their timecards.
The lawsuit points to a specific example involving Groshko. On June 19, she emailed her supervisor, Security Supervisor Joseph Hannon, about a discrepancy she noticed on her timecard from June 13. According to the complaint, Hannon confirmed he had changed her time, replying, “Yes, you punched in early. If there is a reason you need to let me know way [why] you did so.”
The suit names Hannon and John T. Brobst, the hospital’s director of security, as the supervisors who allegedly changed employees’ recorded hours. It claims the plaintiffs repeatedly complained to human resources about unpaid lunches and altered timecards, and that in some cases HR told them the supervisors would be warned. The problem continued regardless, the lawsuit says.
Beyond lunch breaks and altered timecards, the lawsuit lists several other tasks the officers say they were not properly paid for, including mandatory drug screenings that ran past the end of their shifts, required annual physical exams scheduled outside of work hours, and travel to training sessions in Allentown that was not fully reimbursed.
For example, the complaint says Santee used his own vehicle to drive from Pottsville to Allentown for defensive tactics training on April 16 and April 20, a roughly one-hour drive each way, and received no mileage reimbursement for either trip. Brown, the complaint says, drove 94 miles round trip to Allentown for training in June and was owed $68.15 in mileage reimbursement at the rate of 72.5 cents per mile, but was paid only $38.57.
Moyer, who no longer works for the hospital, says in the complaint that he is aware of at least 14 instances in which his mandatory overtime was removed from his pay and at least 20 instances in which his clock-in or clock-out time was changed without his consent to match his scheduled shift rather than his actual hours worked.
The lawsuit does not specify a total dollar amount the plaintiffs are seeking. Instead, it asks the court to order LVHN to pay the workers for unpaid lunches, unpaid overtime, and other uncompensated time, along with an equal amount in liquidated damages, which are additional damages meant to penalize employers for wage violations. The suit also asks the court to bar the hospital network from further FLSA and wage law violations and from retaliating against employees who raise concerns about their pay.
As of this report being published, LVHN has not answered the complaint in federal court.
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