The Sarasota offshoot of a Miami area company providing nurses and caregivers owed workers $260,221 after paying them at regular rates for overtime work, a federal court consent judgment said.
That consent judgment in Tampa federal court says that money will go to 44 workers for CSI-Catalano’s Nurses Registry, a part of Northwest Miami-Dade’s Caregiver Services. That’s an average of $5,914 per employee. A dozen of the employees were owed over $10,000. One was shorted $43,907.
An investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division found that CSI “misclassified caregivers as independent contractors and paid them straight-time rates for all hours worked” in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
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“All workers deserve the wages they legally earned, including those who provide essential care to people in our communities,” said Wage and Hour Division District Director Nicolas Ratmiroff in Tampa, Florida. “Employers should contact the Wage and Hour Division to determine if a worker is an employee or an independent contractor. In this case, the employer should have followed federal law in making their determination. When federal and state regulations conflict, employers must abide by the more restrictive of the regulations.”
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