A federal court has ordered a Philadelphia home healthcare staffing agency and its owner to pay nearly $410,000 in back wages and liquidated damages to 43 employees after US Department of Labor investigators found that the employer misclassified workers as independent contractors. On March 14, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania entered a consent judgment that requires Lady of Fatima Health Services Inc. — operating as Lady of Fatima Healthcare Services — and its owner Fatmata Turray to pay $204,110 in back wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages to the affected employees. The employer must also pay $22,295 in civil money penalties for the repeat and willful nature of the violations. Investigators with the department’s Wage and Hour Division determined that Lady of Fatima Health Services violated the Fair Labor Standards Act when it misclassified some home healthcare workers as independent contractors and paid them straight time for all hours worked. The agency also failed to combine hours worked, both when an employee cared for more than one patient in a pay period and when full-time office employees also performed home health services within the same pay period, and did not include on-call earnings in the computation of overtime rates of pay.
