PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A Willow Grove home care agency has been ordered to pay millions for failing to pay overtime to its workers.
A federal court found that between April 2016 and September 2019, TriMed Healthcare paid its employees in all straight time, even if they worked more than 40 hours in a week.
Under a federal consent judgment, TriMed has been ordered to pay $4.1 million, with $3.8 million going directly to the company's 433 employees for back wages and penalties.
Brian Krier, a senior trial attorney with the U.S. Labor Department, said records showed the company reduced pay rates to avoid paying overtime. "They did this by changing employees' rates of pay based on the amount of hours worked so that they always made the same hourly rate no matter what," he said.
Read the complete judgment below.
"Their records showed that every pay period, the owner would go in and change their employees' regular rates of pay to avoid paying time-and-a-half overtime."
Krier said the government was ready to take the case to trial, before all sides agreed to the judgment.
"We were prepared to go before a jury and present evidence that employees had complained to the employers that they weren't being paid the proper overtime," he told KYW Newsradio. "And in this case they also weren't being paid for travel time during the workday."
The action affects 433 employees who make an average of $11 or $12 an hour.
An attorney for TriMed did not respond to our request for comment.
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