Chicago-area hospitals might have unlawfully conspired to suppress the salaries of registered nurses.

Investigation and pending class action against the major corporate owners of hospitals and healthcare facilities in the Chicago, Illinois area including Advocate Health Care, Children's Memorial Hospital, Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, Michael Reese, Medical Center Corporation, Doctors Communit Healthcare Corporation, Resurrection Health Care and University of Chicago Hospitals.

The class action complaint alleges that the defendant hospitals have for years conspired among themselves and with other hospitals in the Chicago area to depress the compensation levels of registered nurses ("RNs") employed at the conspiring hospitals. These hospitals agreed to regularly exchange detailed and non-public information about the compensation each is paying or will pay to its RN employees. The agreement to exchange such information has facilitated the formation, implementation and enforcement of defendants' wage-fixing conspiracy. Pursuant to this agreement defendants and their co-conspirators in fact have exchanged such information, through meetings, telephone conversations and written surveys. The exchange of this information itself has suppressed competition among Chicago-area hospitals in the compensation of RN employees, and has depressed the compensation they have paid to such employees, in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act.

The Chicago-area hospitals' conspiratorial conduct has occurred in the context of a national nursing shortage. Absent their conspiracy, Chicago-area hospitals would have responded to the nursing shortage by, among other things, substantially increasing RN compensation in an effort to attract a sufficient number of RNs to their respective hospitals. The history of hospital RN compensation and vacancy rates in the Chicago area, however, reveals that hospital RNs are not being compensated at competitive levels. Despite years of high vacancy rates, compensation for hospital RNs in the Chicago area has remained low and surprisingly stagnant. The few compensation increases in the past several years have been far too small to substantially decrease the area's nursing shortage.