Home Health & Hospice Week

Home care providers continue to face labor law cases.

Case No. 1: The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed suit against an Erie, New York-based home health agency. Heartfelt Home Healthcare Services Inc. fired a pregnant scheduling coordinator with hyper-tension because of those conditions, the EEOC charges in a release.

“The company’s president and vice president repeatedly told the pregnant worker that she was a ‘liability to the company’ due to her condition,” the release says. The agency fired her after “she was treated at a hospital for early contractions, despite the fact that she remained qualified to perform her job and was not medically restricted from performing her duties,” the EEOC says. Such conduct violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as amended by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“Pregnancy discrimination remains a substantial barrier for female workers more than 43 years after the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 became law,” EEOC Philadelphia District Director Jamie Williamson says in the release. The EEOC filed suit after first attempting to reach a pre-litigation settlement through its conciliation process, it notes.

Case No. 2: In California, the Labor Commissioner’s Office has cited Angel Connection Nursing Care and Angel Connection Nursing Services in Long Beach for improperly misclassifying 66 home health care workers as independent contractors, the state says in a release. Investigators determined that Annabelle Ricasata, the owner of Angel Connection Nursing Care and a full-time employee of Angel Connection Nursing Services, misclassified the employees as independent contractors to avoid paying required wages, workers’ compensation insurance, and payroll taxes.

Ricasata and Angel Connection Nursing Services owners Merjilyn Chu and Joseph Fortunato are liable for about $1 million due to workers, $283,000 in liquidated damages, $329,500 in overtime wages, $14,000 in contract wages, and $181,500 in interest, according to the release. Angel Connection Nursing Care is also liable for $330,000 for the misclassification of 66 workers, $171,000 for failure to provide itemized wage statements, and $357,046 for a Stop Order Penalty Assessment for failure to provide workers’ compensation insurance.

“When workers are misclassified as independent contractors, there is a damaging domino effect that impacts all levels of our economy. In this case, caretakers were systematically denied minimum wage, overtime, and other legally required working conditions,” California Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower says in the release. “Unscrupulous employers who misclassify workers do so not only to dodge obligations, but also to gain an unfair business advantage over employers who comply with the law.”