The U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”), through its Wage and Hour Division (“WHD”), has been intensifying its pursuit of Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) violations by residential care facilities, nursing facilities, home health and home care services and other care-focused industry employers where it believes that low wages and high rates of violations are prevalent. Since launching its nationwide initiative in 2021 to reduce FLSA violations in the health care industry, the DOL has completed more than 1,600 investigations, which has led to its recovery of more than $28.6 million in back wages and damages for nearly 25,000 workers and assessments of $1.3 million in civil monetary damages for employers who willingly violated the law.1
The most common FLSA violations are the failure to pay overtime and federal minimum wage, and to maintain accurate records of work hours, but there has been an uptick since 2022 of DOL lawsuits against health care facilities, nursing registries, and staffing agencies alleging FLSA violations for misclassifying employees as independent contractors resulting in unpaid overtime.2
Currently, WHD investigators are targeting the Southeast region in states like Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.3 According to the DOL4, from 2020 to 2022, WHD investigators identified violations in nearly 89 percent of more than 1,200 home care and nursing care investigations in the Southeast, which led to...
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