News & Commentary April 4, 2023

[Omaha Steve]

https://onlabor.org/techwork-april-3-2023/

By Chinmay G. Pandit

Chinmay G. Pandit is a student at Harvard Law School.

In today’s Tech@Work: Courts continue to shape the contours of Illinois’s BIPA legislation. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs estimates a substantial global productivity boost from workplace AI tools.
Courts Provide Two Key BIPA Rulings

Courts issued two major decisions in March pertaining to Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).

First, after hearing oral arguments in January for Walton v. Roosevelt University, the Illinois Supreme Court held that federal collective bargaining law preempts unionized employees’ claims under the state’s Privacy Act. In the high-profile case, the justices ruled that management rights clauses within collective bargaining agreements are sufficiently expansive to include bargaining over privacy rights, thereby barring individual negotiating over at-work privacy matters. The union employee plaintiff filed a class-action complaint against his former employer, alleging that the workplace time-keeping mechanism collected biometric data in violation of BIPA. However, Illinois’s appellate court, affirmed by the state’s high court, held that timekeeping procedures are “a topic for negotiation that is clearly covered by the collective bargaining agreement” and therefore subject to federal collective bargaining law.

Second, the Northern District of Illinois denied Papa John’s motion to dismiss a proposed class action lawsuit alleging that the company impermissibly collected employee fingerprint data via its point-of-sale system, violating BIPA’s notice and consent provisions and its retention and storage provisions. In the case Kyles v. Hoosier Papa LLC, Papa John’s argued that the company itself neither possessed nor actively collected worker’s biometric data; and, according to the company, even though franchisees may have collected employee data, Papa John’s had only limited access to such information. But the court disagreed, finding that the Papa John’s had enough control over the point-of-sale systems used by franchisees and collected reports on those information systems. Additionally, the court held that an employer need not “actively collect” biometric data in order to violate BIPA. Rather, the defendant need only take an “active step” to collect or obtain the data beyond mere possession, a threshold the court found to be met in this case.

FULL story at link above.