Gerard Scimeca, an attorney and the chairman of CASE – Consumer Action for a Stronger Economy, wrote a recent opinion piece about the nation’s nursing shortage and how a series of lawsuits “making increasingly outrageous claims” against healthcare staffing companies could worsen it.
Scimeca writes that there are some who seek “to exploit our legal system with frivolous lawsuits for a big payday.” They include attorneys who have taken to a new trend of alleging that run-of-the-mill contractual disputes between healthcare workers and their employers or recruiters violate human trafficking laws, which can produce exceptionally larger damages than the standard labor laws that should govern contractual disputes.
Scimeca argues, “To be clear, backing out of a purely voluntary deal is not human trafficking or indentured servitude — it’s a worker failing to honor a contract. To equate that experience with trafficking, slavery or forced-labor violations makes a mockery of victims throughout the world.”
Scimeca concludes, “America needs the nurses these agencies bring — let’s not undermine them with senseless litigation that makes a mockery of the legal system.”
Read the full piece here.