Tue, 05/04/2021
On April 29, 2021, MSE sued the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Bureau of Prisons on behalf of 235 current and former DOJ Bureau of Prisons employees at Federal Correctional Institution McKean, Pennsylvania, to recover hazardous duty pay, environmental differential pay, and backpay for overtime wages that were incorrectly calculated, after they were required to work on a daily basis in the hazardous work environment caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic.
The complaint alleges that the Department of Justice has admitted that, according to the CDC, “the confined nature of correctional facilities, combined with their congregant environments, heighten[s] the potential for COVID-19 to spread once introduced into a facility.” Indeed, FCI McKean identified its first COVID-19 case as early as October 2020, and as of March 1, 2021, McKean inmates have surpassed 500 confirmed positive cases, with at least five recently confirmed positive cases among the facility’s correctional workers.
Certain federal employees must be paid a 25% hazard pay differential when working in close proximity to a “virulent biological” and other federal employees are entitled to environmental pay differentials when they work in close proximity to micro-organisms which involve potential personal injury, death, or acute and prolonged disease.
As noted in the LAW360 article covering the lawsuit, the “conditions at FCI McKean during the pandemic qualified as exposing them to “virulent biologicals,” but the prison has refused to pay the correctional officers hazard pay or the environmental pay differentials. The Back Pay Act entitles them to interest on any wages they are owed, and the FLSA requires any overtime pay to be recalculated for when the hazard and environmental differentials would have pushed up their base-pay rate.”
When asked about the hazard pay claims in the lawsuit, lead attorney and MSE Partner Sara Faulman explained, “These sorts of pay, and specifically hazard pay, are meant to compensate employees when they are forced to work with certain hazards that were not considered when the position was classified. Prior to 2020, no one imagined these hard-working men and women would be exposed to a deadly and extremely contagious virus on a daily basis, one that they can easily contract and bring home to family members. These pay provisions are in place for circumstances exactly like those faced by the workers here at FCI McKean. The least the Government could do is follow its own laws when these unforeseeable dangers arise.”
The lawsuit seeks to recover monetary damages plus interest for failure to provide hazard pay and environmental differential pay, and backpay and liquidated damages for the plaintiffs’ FLSA regular rate violations, and attorneys’ fees.
This lawsuit is one of many filed by MSE against the Bureau of Prisons for its failure to properly protect employees from hazards and to compensate employees for their increased risks of working during the global pandemic. If you think you have been wrongfully denied hazard pay in your federal workplace, contact us now at info@mselaborlaw.com.
