The US Department of Labor has obtained a consent judgment requiring a Wyncote home healthcare 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 department’s Wage and Hour Division that found Wyncote Wellness LLC routinely violated the minimum wage and overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
The investigation revealed that Wyncote Wellness regularly failed to pay employees the required overtime rate and instead paid employees, who had multiple clients, with separate checks for each client they worked with each week. 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 found 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, including travel time between clients when employees worked with multiple clients in a day.
