Honda Employee Says Workers Were Underpaid Following December 2021 Kronos Data Breach

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A proposed collective action alleges Honda Development & Manufacturing of America, LLC failed to properly pay certain employees in the wake of a data breach that hampered the company’s timekeeping system in December 2021.

According to the 14-page case, Honda failed to accurately track employees’ hours and pay them proper wages after the Kronos timekeeping system was rendered inoperable due to a data breach on December 11, 2021. The lawsuit alleges that although Honda “could have easily implemented a system” to accurately record workers’ hours until the outage was resolved, it failed to do so.

“Instead, Honda pushed the cost of the Kronos outage onto the most economically vulnerable people in its workforce,” the suit states. “Honda made the economic burden of the Kronos outage fall on frontline workers—average Americans—who rely on the full and timely payment of their wages to make ends meet.”

The case claims that certain non-exempt Honda workers are owed unpaid regular and overtime wages as a result of the automaker’s alleged pay practices in light of the Kronos incident. Per the suit, Honda paid affected workers in multiple workweeks “based on estimates of time or pay, or based upon arbitrary considerations,” other than the actual number of hours they put in each pay period.

In the wake of the Kronos data breach, Honda, rather than accurately track workers’ time, used “various methods” to estimate the number of hours its employees worked during each pay period, the lawsuit alleges. As a result, many workers were paid for fewer hours than they actually worked, including overtime, the suit claims.

The plaintiff says he is one of thousands of Honda employees affected by the automaker’s timekeeping practices. Though he works an average of 55 hours per week, the plaintiff has not been paid proper overtime wages for every hour worked in excess of 40 each week since the Kronos hack, according to the complaint.

The plaintiff alleges Honda’s post-Kronos pay practices violate the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, and argues that any payment made to workers for previously unpaid wages “was not supervised by the Department of Labor or any court.”

The lawsuit looks to represent current or former non-exempt Honda employees who worked in Alabama at any time during the Kronos service outage, beginning on or around December 11, 2021 and until the time Honda regained full access to all Kronos products and services and resumed normal timekeeping and payment operations.

The case excludes anyone who opts into another lawsuit filed against Honda, titled Michael Albert v. Honda Development & Manufacturing of America, LLC, No. 2:22-cv-00694.

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