Many nurses at St. Joe’s in Joliet only receiving partial paychecks

Three local hospitals use Ultimate Kronos Group for its timekeeping and payroll, but only one was negatively impacted by the ransomware attack Dec. 11, 2021, which affected UKG’s Kronos Private Cloud.

Kronos is not up and running yet for Morris Hospital. It was unknown Monday if the Kronos system was restored at Silver Cross.

Janet Long, public relations manager at Morris Hospital, said Morris Hospital is using an alternate means to process payroll.

“We successfully delivered payroll on Dec. 24 as scheduled and will continue to use our back up system until Kronos is restored,” Long said in an email Jan. 4.

Debra Robbins, director of marketing and communications for Silver Cross, said Silver Cross hasn’t experienced any disruption in payroll since the Kronos situation began.

“All employees have been paid on time and will continue to be paid on time,” Robbins said in an email Jan. 4.

AMITA Health Saint Joseph Medical Center in Joliet went to a manual process “to ensure our associates are paid accurately and on schedule,” Timothy Nelson, AMITA Health’s system director for communications and media relations, said in a text message Jan. 4.

But that isn’t happening, according to Pat Meade, a board member of the St. Joseph Nurses Association, which represents union nurses at the Joliet hospital, even though the Kronos system was back up and running Saturday.

In the meantime, nurses were keeping track of hours worked through a paper form and still aren’t caught up on the money owed to them, Meade said.

In addition, the Illinois Nurses Association asked St. Joe’s nurses to provide details to the union on any amount they were shorted. This included copies of their pay stubs, as well as details on their rates, hours worked, shift differentials and incentive pay, Meade said.

“My concern is that there are so many pieces of paper that are mounting,” Meade said. “Surely they don’t have the staff to go through those. … This is nationwide and hospital-wide; it’s not just the nurses who are being impacted. How are they going to catch up with all those pieces of paper?”

Meade said St. Joe’s manual tracking include various boxes to be checked, such as any vacation time used or extra shifts worked. But Meade said the hospital isn’t communicating if payroll was receiving these papers and processing them or if the hospital is simply storing the sheets for future rectification.

“We’re just handing in the paper,” Meade said.

Meade said that since nurses are receiving their base pay from “the last two checks ago,” the hospital is trying to “spot fix individual checks” that are still “grossly out of line.”

Meade said nurses have told her they’re not receiving shift differential pay, incentive pay for the hours the nurses have already worked, that they’re short anywhere from $800 to $2,000, that they can’t make their rent, mortgage and car payments, and that they’ve used up their savings.

“[COVID-19] is off the charts,” Meade said. “You want nurses to work. But you can’t guarantee nurses are going to get paid. But you’re paying the traveling nurses and the agency nurses.”

Meade said it’s almost “undoable” for the nurses to break down the money owed to them because of the various codes payroll uses.

“We don’t know that information,” Meade said. “We don’t have access to that.”

John Fitzgerald, staff specialist for Illinois Nurses Association, said the way St. Joe’s pays its nurses is “a complete disaster on a good day,” even before the Kronos’ ransomware attack.

“It’s clear to me that paying their nurses what they’re owed is not a priority to them,” Fitzgerald said.

As an example, Fitzgerald said he’s filed grievances on nurses not being paid properly when they are off work due to illness. He’s had to file a grievance on a nurse who wasn’t receiving her tuition reimbursement. Often, nurses often don’t receive that pay until weeks – or months – later, he said.

And now, because St. Joe’s is estimating nurses’ pay on a basis that is often far too low, while trying to figure out all of the variables – sick time, overtime, shift differentials, vacation pay, short term disability and taxes – Fitzgerald said the nurses “are just getting weirds amount of money.”

“In some cases the estimation is not unreasonable and in some cases it’s very unreasonable,” Fitzgerald said and later adding, “I’m sure that some have been overpaid.”

Will the nurses have to repay any overpayments?

“I don’t know,” Fitzgerald said.

Eventually, the Illinois Nurses Association started helping the nurses keep track of the pay that is owed them, Fitzgerald said.

“Now the hospital will tell you, ‘Look, it was not their fault. Their vendor got hacked,’” Fitzgerald said. “But the fact of the matter is, payroll used to be handled in house. The employees decided, I presume, that this was an opportunity to save money by outsourcing it this. They did it to save money and now our nurses are feeling the pain of it.”

Fitzgerald is also concerned about identity theft. And he’s concerned for the non-union nurses who can’t address the issue with one united voice.

“The hospital is dangerously short-staffed,” Fitzgerald said. “About 1 in 6 nurses right now, I believe, is an agency nurse – who the hospital is paying $6,000 a week.”

Nelson said Monday that agency nurses were not affected by the Kronos outage.

On top of that, Fitzgerald said the hospital is “dismissive” of the nurses and won’t engage with them to “improve the retention of nurses, improve the moral of nurses.”

Have any nurses quit over the issue?

“Not to my knowledge, but it’s only been a few weeks,” Fitzgerald said. “But they are in an uproar. I think sometimes nurses are too dedicated in what they do.”

Fitzgerald said St. Joe’s is the union’s hospital having this particular payroll issue. That’s why the Illinois Nurses Association filed a complaint with St. Joe’s on Monday

“Our members have a legal right to be paid for all their hours worked,” Fitzgerald said.