Home Health & Hospice Week

Learn lessons from a recent Wage & Hour settlement.

Don’t fall into the trap of failing to count travel time in non-exempt employees’ hours worked, or you could be very sorry.

That’s the lesson Total Health Home Care Corp. in the Philadelphia area learned when it settled a class action lawsuit over aides’ travel pay for $2.2 million. The Service Employees International Union bankrolled the suit, which four Total Health employees filed in 2006.

“The settlement of this case illustrates the extent of potential liability in wage and hour litigation,” says law firm Greenebaum Doll & McDonald based in Lexington, KY.

Total Health announced the settlement in November, noting that it would rather spend money on changing its policy than fighting the suit in court or arbitration, according to press reports.

Total Health founder and president Michael Callahan noted that “there is considerable confusion and widely varying interpretations regarding the conflicting federal and state wage mandates that pertain to the home-health industry.”

Hourly pay for travel time between clients “is virtually unheard of within the industry,” Callahan added in a release. “We have been unable to verify a single competitor that does so.”

“This is a huge victory for home care workers, and we are finally going to get the back wages we were shortchanged,” said plaintiff Tracey Dennis in an SEIU release.

The settlement covers 3,000 Total Health employees from 2002 to 2007, the SEIU notes.

More settlements may be coming, Greenebaum notes on its Web site. Plaintiffs have filed three other parallel suits in Pennsylvania against home care companies.

Ignore Travel Time At Your Peril

Failing to treat travel time as hours worked is one of HHAs’ most common employee payment missteps, said attorney John Gilliland II in a recent Eli-sponsored audioconference series, “40 Wage-and-Hour Mistakes Healthcare Providers Make--And How to Avoid Them.”

When an employee travels during the workday, that time counts as working time, explained labor law expert Gilliland, with Gilliland & Markette in Indianapolis. “The problem is employers don’t count it as working time; they simply ignore it.”

You must take that time into account when figuring minimum wage and overtime hours, Gilliland instructs. The Department of Labor’s Wage & Hour Division “is watching for it,” he warns.

Watch out: So are employees, attorneys and interested parties like unions who can file private lawsuits, experts warn.