FAYETTEVILLE, ARK. – A federal judge in Arkansas on July 24 granted a collective of Tyson Foods workers class certification in a lawsuit that alleges the company subjected the workers to unlawful wage practices after a payroll system was hacked in 2021.

The lawsuit was filed by Annie Thornton on behalf of other employees that were in a similar situation. The original case started in April 2022.

According to the complaint, Tyson could not access its timekeeping records between Dec. 5 and Dec. 11, 2021, after a hacker took over its payroll system supplied by Ultimate Kronos Group and asked for a ransom to regain access to the servers.

To receive a paycheck, the company allegedly issued duplicate records from a previous pay period that stopped on Dec. 4.

With Tyson forced to revert to manual timekeeping, Thornton alleges in the suit that the company failed to fully account for all hours worked by non-exempt employees, which led to undercompensating the workers.

The company began to repay employees after the incident, but Thornton argues that the reconciliation process to repay employees was unlawful because the process “netted employees pay across weeks and pay periods, such that it only determined whether the employee was overall over- or underpaid as a result of the outage, rather than treating each pay period on its own.”

In a reply brief, Thornton offered a compromise collective definition which narrows the collective to people who worked at least 40 hours during the relevant date range.

Tyson stated that it opposed the certification, according to court documents. The company argued that Thornton could not show that she is in a similar position as Tyson’s other non-exempt employees, especially ones that are in different facilities. Tyson asked that the scope of the case be limited to its Eufaula, Ala., plant where Thornton is employed.

According to the court documents, Rusty Courson, senior director of corporate accounting at Tyson Foods said that the hack caused an outage for Ultimate Kronos Group that lasted from Dec. 11, 2021 to Jan. 15, 2022.

The company instituted manual timekeeping at its facilities. It used local time clocks where available, which included “a detailed reconciliation audit for almost six months and scrutinized the manual time records, local time clock reports, and payroll records of the affected employees to ensure they were accurately and completely compensated.”

Courson said employees who were undercompensated were given full reconciliation payments by no later than June 23, 2022.