Wed, 12/16/2020
A favorable decision for 115 Kentucky federal prison employees came the other day when the US Court of Federal Claims rejected the government’s attempts to dismiss their hazardous duty pay case.
MSE partner and lead attorney on the case, David Ricksecker, stated in the LAW360 article covering this decision that “[These employees] are going to work in the prison, which is already dangerous, and then on top of that now they have the COVID-19 pandemic raging through there, so it’s really important for them to get this additional pay … which Congress authorized through legislation for exactly these types of circumstances.”
The case was filed July 2020 on behalf of current and former employees at the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky, which is part of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The claim in this case is that the prison knowingly failed to include the hazardous duty pay when calculating the employees’ regular rate of pay, leading to incorrect overtime pay rates under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The suit is seeking to award each plaintiff monetary damages, including liquidated pay equal to the overtime pay they should have received plus interest, as well as attorneys’ fees.
This lawsuit comes at a time where COVID-19 cases are seeing serious spikes among federal prisons. As noted in the Law360 article, “6,023 people incarcerated at [BOP] facilities and 1,759 staff members currently had positive cases, and 26,197 incarcerated people and 2,398 staff members had recovered. There had been 163 deaths of incarcerated people and two staff member deaths due to the disease.”
The case is Adams et al. v. USA, case number 1:20-cv-00909, in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
