An Illinois nursing home chain has been ordered to pay close to $3 million in back wages to thousands of workers after a federal investigation found the company failed to pay correct overtime to workers, the Department of Labor announced Monday.
Petersen Health Care Inc. of Peoria, IL, must pay $2,939,576 in back overtime wages to more than 3,000 caregivers to resolve the investigation. The violated employees work in 84 resident nursing care facilities across three states. It’s the company’s third — and biggest — ordered payout for alleged wage violations since 2009.
The Department of Labor alleged the provider failed to pay the correct overtime after wrongly assuming the affected workers were not entitled to overtime pay. It also accused Petersen Health Care of failing to pay wages for meal periods of less than 20 minutes, not adding bonuses and other incentives to pay workers’ hourly rate when accounting for overtime, and failing to maintain accurate records of work hours.
Petersen Health Care did not return McKnight’s Long-Term Care News request for comment by production deadline.
The company’s primary owner and CEO Mark Peterson also has signed an enhanced compliance agreement with the department to ensure it follows the Fair Labor Standards Act in the future.
The department said Petersen has systematically violated wage and hour laws on “numerous occasions,” and that it has conducted about 30 investigations of the provider over the last 20 years. The company has previously been ordered to pay $42,000 to comply with the FLSA and $88,000 in back wages within the last 13 years.
“While residential healthcare workers at Petersen Health Care Inc. provided around-the-clock, daily living assistance and delivered essential care to people in need, they were subject to pay practices that underreported their hours of work and denied them the pay they were legally due,” Jessica Looman, acting administrator of the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, said in a statement Monday.
“As healthcare industry employers struggle to retain and recruit workers to provide the services necessary for their businesses to succeed, failing to respect workers’ rights and pay workers their full wages means that these essential workers will look elsewhere for employment,” she added.
Earlier this year, the Department of Labor ordered the operators of three Oklahoma City nursing homes to pay more than $27,000 in back wages due to overtime violations. A California nurse staffing company in October 2019 agreed to pay $2.75 million to settle an overtime and wage dispute with workers.
