Legal Victory for Former Vanderbilt University Medical Center Employees

A Middle District of Tennessee judge has ruled in favor of 200 former employees of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in a class action suit that alleged the medical center violated the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. The WARN Act requires employers give employees a 60-day notice in advance of mass layoffs. According to attorney Jerry Martin, the 200 Vanderbilt employees received no notice when they were fired in July 2013. “A lot of these individuals are hourly-paid employees who made $12, $13, $14 an hour,” says Martin. “The WARN Act is intended to give those individuals two months to make plans to look for other employment.” Martin says in most cases the affected employees were low-wage workers with little or no ability to absorb an unexpected job loss. The court-approved settlement will require Vanderbilt to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages to the workers, plus attorneys’ fees. Vanderbilt has reserved its right to appeal the decision. According to Martin, Tennessee has little protection for workers in state employment law, forcing citizens to rely on federal regulations, as they did in this case. “There’s a lot of states that have comprehensive and progressive state law that provides protection and benefits to workers beyond the federal statutes that apply,” he says. “Here in Tennessee we have none of that.” Tennessee is an “employment at will” state, which means employers can legally hire, fire, suspend or discipline individual employees at any time for any reason – or for no reason at all. The WARN Act supersedes that practice for employers with 100 or more employees, and requires them to provide 60 days advance notice of plant closings and mass layoffs.