The US Department of Labor has obtained a consent judgment that will recover $9.3 million in back wages and liquidated damages for 1,756 employees of a Philadelphia healthcare staffing company that misclassified them and willfully denied their hard-earned overtime pay. Obtained by the department’s Office of the Solicitor in Philadelphia on Sept. 26, 2022, the judgment in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania requires US Medical Staffing Inc. to pay $4,650,000, in back wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages, and a civil money penalty of $700,000, for the willful nature of its violations. The action follows a complaint the department filed on Sept. 2, 2022.
The judgment follows an investigation by the department’s Wage and Hour Division that found — from at least Sept. 24, 2017, through at least May 22, 2022 — the employer willfully denied the affected employees their overtime pay. The division determined US Medical Staffing paid the employees straight time for all hours worked and failed to pay time and one-half the required rate for hours over 40 in a workweek, in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act. In addition, in some cases, investigators determined that the employer claimed falsely to be a registry through which the company’s clients solely employed the workers. In other cases, US Medical Staffing misclassified employees as independent contractors.
