Company sued by Orlando nurses also shorted COVID-19 workers $3,000,000 in pay, feds say
A healthcare staffing company with at least one state of Florida contract missed payrolls and owed COVID-19 testers in Orlando over $3 million in back pay, the U.S. Department of Labor said.
A lawsuit by eight Orlando area nurses say they’ve had a similar experience in getting earned money from Favorite Healthcare Systems.
Favorite, in a Tuesday email to the Miami Herald, said Labor’s announcement “contained inaccurate and misleading information” and the company “contacted multiple people at the (Department of Labor) requesting a retraction.”
A spokesman at Labor confirmed that had been discussed. As of Thursday at 2 p.m., the release remained on Labor’s site, unchanged from its Oct. 5 posting: Favorite had paid $3,068,059 in owed back pay to 1,677 employees.
That’s $1,829.49 per employee.
As reported by the Miami Herald in June, Favorite had a $140 million no-bid contract with the state for medical “staff augmentation.” The company’s state of Florida filings say its done business here since 1988.
Labor said it’s Wage and Hour Division investigators found that Favorite “missed several payroll payments” which Labor’s spokesman clarified meant most of the 1,677 workers didn’t get all their pay on the scheduled pay date. That counted as a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s minimum wage and overtime rules.
Favorite didn’t see the late payments as “missing payroll,” and blamed being tardy with money on “late time sheets and/or logistical errors.”
The Kansas-based company said it paid the $3 million-plus “voluntarily” and not as part of any agreement with Labor. Labor said Wage and Hour Division reached a verbal agreement with Favorite to pay what it owed and follow the FLSA going forward.
Nursing Money
The lawsuit asks for earned straight pay and earned overtime pay for Andrew Cramer, Jeannine Donigan, Kim Graden, Latoya Latson, Anita Redfern, Scott Sakall, Brittany Walker and Bridgett Williams-Cooper.
The eight registered nurses said when they signed to work in Florida for Favorite during the pandemic, the company promised at least 48 hours per week with overtime pay once they exceeded 40 hours in a week. They began work on March 20.
From that point, the nurses claim:
▪ “Even on their scheduled days off, (six nurses) were sequestered to their hotel rooms and treated as on-call time,” for which they weren’t paid.
(The suit says two nurses didn’t have to stay in a hotel as part of their disability accommodations, but their down time was similarly not allowed to be their personal time).
▪ They were made to go to staff meetings for which they weren’t paid.
▪ They “were routinely obligated to report for mandatory temperature checks, which would take anywhere between 30 to 45 minutes to complete,” for which they weren’t paid.
▪ Favorite Healthcare “required Plaintiffs to sign pre-completed timesheets that inaccurately reflected hours worked for any given day.”
▪ Favorite “routinely threatened to retaliate against any staff that dared to fill out whistleblower/bullying reports by terminating them.”
Favorite responded to the suit by moving it to federal court. In a filing there, Favorite said it “at all times acted in good faith to comply with the FLSA,” and doesn’t believe it violated the FLSA.
Favorite “asserts a lack of willfulness or intent to violate the FLSA as a defense to any claim by Plaintiffs for liquidated damages.”
This story was originally published October 15, 2020 at 3:19 PM.
