Dive Brief:

• A New York City transit employee filed a lawsuit alleging the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) improperly withheld overtime pay during a recent outage of payroll and timekeeping system Kronos.
• The putative collective action suit, filed Jan. 26 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, claimed the MTA shifted to internal payroll practices when a ransomware attack took down the UKG system. Workers received their straight-time pay but the MTA "decided to arbitrarily withhold the earned overtime wages of its employees who were paid through Kronos' payroll processing services," the suit said, alleging a willful Fair Labor Standards Act violation.
• The lawsuit also claimed the problem, which began in mid-December, is not yet resolved and the MTA has not resumed using Kronos payroll services. "It is unknown when, if ever, Defendants will resume its reliance upon Kronos payroll services, and the FLSA Plaintiffs are just expected to wait for their earned overtime wages." An MTA spokesperson told HR Dive it does not comment on pending litigation.

Dive Insight:

As the extent of the Kronos ransomware attack comes into focus, companies are beginning to file breach notifications under state laws. Puma, for example, recently notified some workers that their personal information was compromised.

The Kronos outage impacted about 8 million total employees, NPR reports, including workers at FedEx, PepsiCo and Whole Foods.

The attack against Kronos...

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