Home Health & Hospice Week

Paying aides as independent contractors didn’t fly for this Georgia provider.

Make sure you’re classifying your aides correctly, or you might have to learn that lesson the hard way.

That’s what happened to Able Mabel Home Care in the Atlanta area, the Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division says in a release. Able “misclassified home health care aides as independent contractors and failed to pay them overtime when they worked over 40 hours in a week, a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act,” WHD says. “The investigation revealed that the employer paid the misclassified workers their straight-time rate of pay for each hour they worked.”

WHD recovered $235,501 in back wages for 131 workers, according to the release.

“The U.S. Department of Labor prioritizes work protections in the care industries and we will vigorously combat misclassification of employees as independent contractors to ensure that this hard-working essential workforce is afforded all the protections the law provides,” WHD Atlanta District Director Steven Salazar says in the release.