Nurses Union Sues Nonprofit Hospital System Over Accusations of Withholding Wages

CommonSpirit Health, the second-largest nonprofit hospital system in the U.S., is being sued in a class action lawsuit by members of the Oregon Nurses Association (ONA). Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg and the St. Anthony Hospital in Pendleton, two of CommonSpirit’s 140 hospitals, are being accused of withholding wages from healthcare workers.

Over 500 healthcare workers, represented by the ONA, say that CommonSpirit still owes the employees wages that weren’t paid last year. The class action lawsuit is seeking to recover unpaid wages and damages and “prevent CommonSpirit from continuing its wage theft and provide a fair and accurate accounting of workers’ hours and pay.”

“In October 2022, CommonSpirit experienced a cyberattack which compromised more than half a million patients’ personal health information and shut down hospital IT systems including electronic timekeeping systems,” ONA said in a press release. “In the pay periods following the outage, CommonSpirit significantly underpaid many nurses and allied health workers while also claiming it overpaid certain workers.”

Read the source article at nurse.org