For the troubled memory maker Qimonda things may get even tougher as the company is facing a class-action lawsuit from the former employees of its plant based in Richmond, Virginia.

Qimonda’s U.S. business unit has been slammed with a putative class action filed by former fab employees who claim the manufacturer of dynamic random access memory violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act by failing to give them correct notice before shutting down its Virginia plant, reports Law360 web-site.

Lead plaintiffs Lakita Blair, Linda Frazier and Bonnie Wright lodged the suit Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (Blair et al. v. Qimonda North America Corp. et al., case number 09-cv-00073), alleging that Qimonda knew it would close down the fab about two months before the formal announcement that caught employees completely uninformed. Qimonda AG of Germany as well as Qimonda North American Corp. and Qimonda Richmond LLC were named as defendants.

Qimonda officially said in a statement that it did not have money to upgrade the Richmond, Virginia-based plant in order to make chips using the company’s much-discussed Buried Wordline technology and leading-edge fabrication processes. Moreover, the company said it was no longer in a financial position to provide for severance benefits to the employees.

The former workers of Qimonda’s Virginia plant demand damages equal to the sum of unpaid wages, salary, commissions, bonuses, accrued holiday and vacation pay, and pension and 401(k)contributions for 60 working days.

Qimonda, which filed for insolvency protection in January, did not comment on the news-story.

Tags: Qimonda, Business