My reply to Mr. Clark (it's long, get ready) - nm Posted: Oct 31st, 2017 - 3:36 pm In Reply to: Cannot understand how email dated 10/31 announces - decision to revise, yet states all
Dear Mr. Clark,
I am one of the many medical transcriptionists who received your notice today that transcriptionists would finally be receiving the $1000 bonus that was promised to them by their managers and by their company during the Petya virus episode.
I have very mixed emotions about your letter. On the one hand I am very glad that Nuance for whatever reason (and I have my suspicions about how this went down) decided to "man up" and do the right thing. I have gone on with my life and I will use this nightmare scenario to teach my students and others the textbook case of how NOT to handle a security breach.
The letter that you wrote today is the letter that should have been written immediately following the breach. The letter is months too late. It would have been much better for every single person involved in this travesty to have written a letter like this to the employees stating the truth. We were hacked; our systems are not complete; we are working very hard to make things right. My personal reasoning is that you did not do that because you were afraid. You were afraid that admitting you did not have the answers might harm the company and ultimately the shareholders. So you asked your HR department to lie to cover and give you time. Maybe you even thought some MTs would believe the story that their managers made a mistake and they would never be paid. Maybe the thinking was the MTs were just not smart enough to understand business law and employee rights. It is insulting to think about.
Personally, I was promised a $3,000 paycheck which was going to buy a vehicle to replace my old vehicle. I worked myself almost to death because my account had children who were scheduled for CAT scans and MRI scans for brain surgeries. My own child had used their system and I was very familiar with how intense and heartbreaking seizures and brain surgery can be for patients and families and was sickened by the fact that my doctors were dictating that they were having to go without records. I worked myself sick. I am just now, months later, feeling a little better. When I worked all the hours I worked until I could literally not move from my chair and then I got a $20 paycheck, it felt as if my world had come to a stop. I simply could not fathom that any major U.S. company would treat their employees so poorly. It was both immoral and illegal. It was SHAMEFUL.
The fact that Nuance had posted things on their intranet and then began to take those items down looked like they were trying to hide what they had done. It looked like a complete fraud. E-mails went unanswered. My manager was told to tell everyone to e-mail payroll and HR who never responded to any e-mails NOR phone calls. I was embarrassed for any person working for your Human Resource Department and I was embarrassed for my manager. When I got the chance to be interviewed by Texas Public Broadcasting Radio regarding this incident I knew that it was the right thing to do. I was speaking up for many MTs who had no voice and had been ripped off by their employer --an especially heinous crime after so many MTs had gone to bat for Nuance after their managers called them desperate on a weekend and begged us to drop what we were doing and start HAND TYPING (no shortcuts, no drafts) pages and pages and pages and pages.
So months later (after major lay-offs) Nuance has decided that given the pressure by the DOL, many Attorney Generals, and even the House Subcommittee on Wages, that maybe they should re-think their actions on ripping off their employees. It is certainly the right thing to do, correcting an error of this magnitude. I am sure the person who has to sign off on the company financials submitted according to Sarbanes-Oxley would have to note pending lawsuits due to employees not being paid their wages (at least in the accounting notes, right?) The structure of the letter never admits that you made any errors – it glosses over the crimes committed against little old ladies (some 88 years old) who steadily worked for Nuance with their atrocious QA quality systems (which are fraudulent in their very infrastructure), their switching the MTs from account to account to account to be certain their earnings were always just above minimum wage and ultimately they were layed off with their work going to India (and from what I hear now the Philippines where the work is done even cheaper).
If it were up to me ALL medical transcription would be done in-hospital and not one bit of it would be allowed to go out of the hospital much less out of the country. A reasonable person, knowing all the potential ways for computer systems to be infiltrated could not and would not in good conscious allow ANY “confidential” records to be sent in and out of various foreign countries where U.S. law could not apply by the very nature of it being in a foreign country. It is a travesty that this has ever happened. It takes jobs away from American workers and it endangers the confidentiality of records. But alas, another story for another day. But this Nuance event and its handling of this situation will be a cornerstone and noted forever in the annals of transcription history. It was rotten to the core and there are thousands who will never forget.
So Mr. Clark, I have gone on to other opportunities. Part of me appreciates very much that Nuance decided to make good on some of their promises. Personally I was not paid correctly even in this latest round as I was promised a $22 dollar an hour rate and instead paid at $9.80-ish. This go round I was shorted a thousand dollars or so and I was never paid my PTO rate that I was promised at 2:1 hours worked nor was I paid for the weekend I worked prior to the virus. I signed off on the paperwork because I am in an intense education program and living in a state where it would be difficult to find the attorney I would need to take Nuance to court. I considered filing pro se, but my time is worth a lot right now, more than I want to rehash old garbage and horrible nightmares that this episode in my life brought to me.
Again, I will speak of Nuance when I teach classes on how NOT to handle a security breach. I might even mention corrupt business practices and the SEC and Sarbanes-Oxley requiring ALL managers of fortune-500 companies being required to sign off on financials being represented accurately and employees not bilked out of pay. Stepping on the backs of your employees to gain a handle on your business going south because your IT department was probably not given the tools that it needed to have the latest and greatest fire walls and/or other security installed is never the way to properly conduct an ethical business. What you did to thousands of people will never be forgotten and will be spoken of for years to come.
The fact that ultimately you made good on some of your promises is to be applauded. I will say that your composition of your letter today was well-worded. However, you could have done better. You could have personally called each and every person that was affected and offended by this. You could have personally apologized and let us know that you were working to make things right. After laying off 400 people and not letting anyone know that you intended to make things right and then out of the blue coming out with this letter is still brutal.
We are all in this world together. What goes around comes around. Everyone involved in this fiasco who worked at Nuance should gear up for the bad karma that the world will provide when you harm innocent people who were trying to help their patients and doctors and families out, and were betrayed by their supervisors and their company. There is a price to pay for that and it does not come in an ADP paycheck.
Now I will accept the apology that I did not get and I will move on with my life. True forgiving is forgetting and that is what I intend to do.
Have a good afternoon.
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