PITTSBURGH (August 25, 2022)—A federal court has ordered a Pennsylvania mother and daughter to pay more than $2.4 million in overtime back wages and liquidated damages, after a three-day trial confirmed the pair used illegal pay practices to avoid paying full wages to 345 workers who provided daily living assistance and home healthcare in the Pittsburgh area.
On Aug. 5, 2022, Judge Christy Criswell Weigand of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania found Anna Zaydenberg, owner of Elder Resource Management Inc., operating as ComForCare Home Care, and her daughter Marsha Simonds, owner of Staff Source, liable for $1,242,146 in back wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages. Both companies are also liable for the full amount.
The ruling follows an investigation and litigation by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division. The investigation found that Zaydenberg and Simonds set up Staff Source and then violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) when they redirected workers’ overtime hours to the staffing company’s pay records to avoid paying overtime.
The division determined that while ComForCare hired the workers and they worked only for the company’s clients, the workers received two separate checks from ComForCare and Staff Source. Investigators discovered that ComForCare staff handled payroll for both companies and manipulated the payrolls repeatedly so that each check showed less than 40 hours a week and often the company paid...
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