A federal investigation has recovered $950,000 in back wages and liquidated damages and $50,000 in punitive damages from a West Lebanon home healthcare business — with a history of unlawful pay practices — that denied overtime wages to 36 employees. Investigators with the US Department of Labor’s (DOL) Wage and Hour Division found that, between April 2020 and August 2022, Your Comfort Zone Inc. doing business as Comfort Zone and its president, Rosalind Godfrey, paid home care workers who provide companionship and assistance to clients in New Hampshire and Vermont straight-time rates for the workers’ hours over 40 in a workweek. In addition to its recovery of wages and liquidated damages, the division assessed and the employer has paid $36,324 in civil money penalties for willful violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s (FLSA) overtime requirements.
A related consent judgment and order, entered in the US District Court for the District of New Hampshire, requires Godfrey and the business to pay $50,000 in punitive damages to certain employees and also permanently prohibits them from violating the FLSA’s anti-retaliation requirements. Among other things, the order enjoins them from retaliating, and taking or threatening any adverse action against any current or former employees because they asserted their rights under the FLSA. View the consent judgment.
