The U.S. Department of Labor has obtained a consent judgment requiring a Wyncote, Pennsylvania, home health care agency and its owner, Dominique Conner, to pay 196 direct care employees a total of $810,320 in back wages and liquidated damages for routinely not paying workers overtime rates and willfully violating federal law.
The consent judgment follows an investigation by the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division that found Wyncote Wellness LLC routinely violated the minimum wage and overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
According to the investigation found that Wyncote Wellness regularly failed to pay employees the required overtime rate. Employees, who had multiple clients, were paid with separate checks for each client they worked with each week, and instead of combining hours worked in a week to calculate overtime rates, Wyncote Wellness paid overtime after employees worked for more than 40 hours with each client.
Additionally, the department reported that employees frequently recorded more hours than they were paid by the employer and were not compensated for travel time between clients. The employer also failed to preserve records of hours worked, the DOL said, including travel time between clients when employees worked with multiple clients in a day.
“Home healthcare workers provide vital services to the most vulnerable members of our communities, and their work deserves respect and fair compensation,” said James Cain, Wage and Hour Division district director in Philadelphia. “This enforcement action will help to ensure workers are paid their total earnings and remind other employers of their obligations under the law.”
In addition to back wages and liquidated damages, the consent judgment requires Wyncote Wellness to pay a civil money penalty the department assessed for the willfulness of the violations.
The division’s Philadelphia District Office conducted the investigation, and the department’s Office of the Solicitor in Philadelphia filed the complaint and consent judgment. The FLSA requires that most employees in the U.S. be paid at least the federal minimum wage for all hours worked and overtime pay at not less than time and one-half their regular rate of pay for all hours worked over 40 in a workweek.
Source: U.S. Department of Labor
Topics Pennsylvania
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