A Pennsylvania home care agency was ordered to pay $1.2 million to workers who the DOL says didn’t get correct overtime wages

• A home care agency in Pennsylvania failed to pay correct overtime wages to around 200 staff, the DOL said.
• Many of the workers had worked more than 50 hours a week, the DOL said.
• A court ordered the company and its owner to pay $1.16 million in back wages and damages.

A federal court ordered a Pennsylvania home care agency to pay $1.16 million in back wages and damages after a labor department investigation found its workers weren’t correctly paid for overtime.

Nursing Care in Home LLC – operating as Meridius Health in Lancaster, Pennsylvania – failed to pay overtime rates to some employees throughout at least 2019 and 2020, the Department of Labor said in a lawsuit filed on April 8.

Workers were meant to receive one and a half times their regular rate of pay if they worked over 40 hours in one week, but the company instead paid some staff their regular hourly wages of between roughly $12 and $14 for overtime hours, the DOL said in the lawsuit.

“During this time period, many employees worked in excess of fifty hours per workweek,” the DOL said.

The ruling comes as the healthcare industry slowly recovers from a labor shortage.

The number of people working in the healthcare and social assistance sector plummeted by nearly 2 million workers from March to April 2020, but has since steadily risen and is now just 1.4% below pre-pandemic levels, per preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But people are still leaving their jobs – the industry had a 2.4% turnover rate in February 2022, with 487,000 workers quitting their jobs that month, the BLS data shows.

From around April 2020, Nursing Care in Home started paying an overtime premium to some employees but not for others, the DOL said.

Some employees’ overtime premium was calculated incorrectly because the company didn’t factor a $240 bi-weekly hazard pay bonus into their standard rate of pay, the DOL said.

The company also failed to make, keep, and preserve adequate and accurate records of employees and their earnings, the DOL said.

In its judgment on April 11, the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ordered Nursing Care in Home and Rustam Suvanidze, the company’s owner, to pay $1.16 million in back wages and liquidated damages to nearly 200 current and former workers, with one employee set to receive $43,750. The company and Suvanidze were also ordered to pay $37,921 in civil penalties.

Lawyers for Nursing Care in Home did not immediately provide a comment when contacted by Insider.

“Home care workers deliver essential services on a daily basis, and their work is vital to the well-being of the people they serve,” Jessica Looman, acting administrator at the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division, said in a statement. “The Wage and Hour Division will not tolerate the exploitation of care workers or attempts to circumvent federal overtime laws.”