people working part time, what is the law?
 

A friend of mine is working part time, $10 an hour.

It's a healthcare service, take care of folks in their homes.

The healthcare service will call and often ask that the employee work for 1 hour. Sometimes 1 1/2, sometimes two.

This generally is about a 5-10 mile drive one way.

Pretty much all the employees do it.

I flipped out.

Let's say you are driving 10 miles each way that is 20 miles. The IRS acknowledges that the cost of a car is 57.5cents a mile.

So if you are working one hour, 10 miles away, it cost you 11.50 to get to work and home. For a $10 pay check. Which, of course, taxes will be taken from.

WTF?

Is this legal?

Now, on top of this, they will ask you to go from one job to another during the course of the day. One hour at one address, they drive to another address for a 3 hour gig. They do not pay your miles between jobs, which is not legal as far as I can tell and they do not pay for the drive time. This I know to not be legal.

Honest, I am between anger and heartbreak for folks doing this.

Seems most never realize it cost them money to get to and from work and just as few (if any realize) that an employer cannot "not pay you" for drive time once you have reported for work if they request you change locations.



Any thoughts or insights into this would be appreciated.


For example, although we all know an employer is not obligated for your expenses driving to and from work, what are is obligations to you if he sends you to another location in regards to then driving home. Must he also compensate you for any extra miles to get home than it took you to get to work?

Seems like they should.

Here you go:

http://www.irs.gov/publications/p463/ch04.html

btw, this job requires a state mandated training course for certification first which the employee has to pay. It's a one week course costing north of $500.

You guessed it, the same healthcare provider you work for teaches the course and makes the money off your training!

this is if you are self employed.

Wonderful. That says you can deduct all that car travel from your taxable income. As if a person working part-time on-call for $10 an hour is going to have any taxable income after the standard exemptions and deductions anyway.

The question is, does the employer legally owe wages for the person's time, from out the door to back to?

Yep - not good at all. To get around that I incorporated myself and am employed as a 1099 subcontractor for the company.

My gasoline bill runs between 300.00 - 400.00 a month; I need all the help I can get.

OK, this fact sheet definitely says the time for travel from worksite A to worksite B must be paid. Some things are not clear though.

Ordinary commuting time from home to a fixed workplace is not paid. But travel time to a temporary work place may be paid. This seems to describe the situation when one is dispatched to client homes ad-hoc, as described here. But I'd like to see that in black and white.

Another likely complication is that the employeer may claim (spuriously) that the employees are 'indepentent contractors,' in an attempt to evade the usual wage and hour rules.

Fact sheet: http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs22.htm

Home heath care employees receive very low pay and suffer many abuses.

Yes, there is a lot of 1099 fraud going on. In my particular case it is all on the level. The home offices are in North Carolina, I run the show down here from my home office, do the books, billing, hiring, etc.

I've been around the block with the IRS a few times - I don't want to do it again.

They are very replaceable and have no bargaining power. Firing and blacklisting will result if a person succeeds in getting the federal wage and hour guys to investigate, which is damned unlikely anyway. Ditto the slightest whiff of a hint of 'organizing.'

Which is idiotic, considering the job they are hired to do. Who wants an underpaid, unhappy person taking care of their loved ones?

The wage and hour regulations to require pay from job to job. The problem with home health workers is often that they work for a very small agency, and the dollar volume does not bring them within the coverage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. If the employer is covered by the FLSA, there are anti-retaliation provisions within the statute. The problem there is that the remedies are extremely limited: no punitive damages except for possible liquidated damages, which amount only to twice backpay. If an employee is making 10 buck per hour, the backpay will be a small amount anyway.

There are attorney fee provisions in enforcement actions, and there are some attorneys who specialize in undertaking class actions challenging payroll practices. That would presume that the folks working for this agency have any interest in joining in a collective action. I would assume that there are attorneys in the NY area who have that type of practice. The local Wage and Hour Division of the DOL would possibly have some contact information.

And there is always the independent contractor scam. The attorneys who handle FLSA class actions are well-equipped to respond to that fiction.

Regards,

D-Ray

Employees who are chiseled-upon, find ways to chisel in turn.

This issue paper thing I found is on-point: https://www.littler.com/files/press/...0Employers.pdf

See pages 14-15 for a discussion of travel time, and 15-17 for discussion of the independent contractor stuff.

Getting portal-to-portal time may be tough, but the time from worksite A to worksite B absolutely must be paid.

There's a discussion of gearing-up and the 'continuous workday rule.' I'd say if the on-call employees are expected to change from off-duty clothes to required uniforms or scrubbs before going out, a case can be made that their workday begins when they suit-up. And if they are expected to wait around dressed for work and available for immediate dispatch, there might be a case that their 'waiting time' is compensible.

If you are voting Republican it is what you wanted, right?

Ha! I don't leave it up to the politicians. When my Mom was dying of cancer, we fixed up the house so she could get around and all of us stayed with her around the clock most of the time. When we couldn't be there, the hospice staff we had come in were awesome - we paid them 35.00/hr. (we hired them ourselves) and they were more than worth it.

Last thing I wanted was someone disgruntled and pissed off in the house with my dying mother.

South Carolina is a red state, and it does not matter what you did with your mother. Republicans will not pass minimum wage bills and are anti-labor. As for you paying someone $35 an hour out of your own pocket I think you are full of it. That is an RN salary. I don't think you are the type to fork over that much even if you had it. Maybe Medicare/Medicaid or insurance paid for her.

Plus many patients are not hospice patients but long-term care patients and probably cannot afford insurance plans that would cover full time-employment of a critical care nurse. There is difference between hospice and what the OP is talking about.

You have serious issues - and my mother mattered to me. You could use an education in polite conversation.

Believe what you like, but try to keep a civil tongue in your head.

And that was more than RN pay in 2000.

Ok at how many hours did you pay $35 for?

We're all done. Congrats, you're the only person I'm ignoring.

My apologies. I can see where it might look like I questioned your love or care taken for your mother.

The pay levels for those involved in direct patient care is an example of the inaccuracy of the market in determining the intrinsic worth of much labor. Market principles don't apply because the consumers of the labor are, as a whole, not financially able to pay a sufficient wage for essential services. That is where we, as a society, must determine whether the value of the folks taking care of society's most vulnerable folks should be paid a wage the reflects their contribution to the quality of life - not only the quality of life for the patients, but the quality of life for the family. If we determine that such services have high intrinsic value, we should collectively pay for them.

Regards,

D-Ray

Nice!

Thumbs up!

He can't claim them as an independent contractor if he is withholding taxes, which is the case.

Good.






56

OK, so today they went to the job site and the client said no service was requested.

Is there any recourse given all these abuses given the person needs the job?

Not really. That is just how it is these days. To be frank your friend needs to increase his or her skill level....in other words become an RN. Even RNs can have it tough though depending on who they work for but it is much better than what home health care givers make.

If they were CALLED into work by that job site and then told they were not needed they should have least received two hours of normal pay IF they are being paid to be on call...that is how my hospital does it for techs. But the people your friend works for do not sound like they would do that.

I mean it sounds like a patient called his agency requesting a care giver but then the patient changed his mind. The agency should at least be paying for the time it took him to drive there.

'Show-up time' is something union workers get.

Here is what I think happened.

They called yesterday about this job as 6 hours at one client is a good days pay for this operation. Then... after confining this job they said, "oh, BTW, we have a one hour job just before this one, it's so convenient."

The client never called in, it was used as a carrot to get the one hour gig, at 6:30 am covered.

He needs to dump that agency if he can. Unless they are offering good benefits or he is getting pretty decent hours.

You say he makes $10? My wife makes $11 as a janitor in a California casino.
Your area in NY and mine in Socal are not too much different in terms of cost of living.

I know some x-ray techs that get hit with the same thing. The bad thing is that these agencies probably have a whole roster of people to do this too.

Now if he is brand new to the agency and wants to keep the job sometimes you have to do the really annoying stuff like what you just detailed in order to make a good reputation and gain regular hours....they tend to call those who tend to show up and thus give them regular hours because they have a reputation for reliability. But if he has been doing this for a few years then they are just using him to save money.

people working part time, what is the law?
 

If a person qualifies , they can get in home help from a federal program called In Home Supportive Services. The in home workers from IHSS are members of SEIU and receive some benefits.

Consumers pay on a sliding scale or receive free services depending on income. Family members can be the caregiver and get paid.

Also, (limited)free in home care is available to anyone over the age of sixty through the Older Americans Act (federal funding).

Contact your local Area Agency on Aging to find out about local services in your area.

so you are suggesting that she (not he) incur $11.20 in expenses to earn $10 for a one hour gig?

BTW, she did do this one week, 4 days, for just the reasons you suggest.

Not suggesting, just letting you know that when people work in a registry those that get called in more often than others are those that say yes a lot,
even when it is really not worth it. I cannot imagine that the company she works for would pull this stuff all the time, otherwise no one would work there.

$10 bucks seems very low to me....

How are her co-workers doing?

My best advice is to get more training if possible...the only way up in the medical field is college and licensing. It is very difficult to make a living wage unless you are an RN, PA, Licensed Medical Imager or PT tech.

What has really happened is that the RN has become the defacto health care worker....where as before you would have LVNs, CNAs and orderlies (to be more correct they are called transporters these days) and RNs now there are just RNs and they end up doing a lot of the stuff LVNs and CNAs did and thus hospitals can save money by not hiring the lower scale positions.

My gut instinct tells me the CNAs that have disappeared from my hospital (we had many in the 90s) are the ones working in the home health care industries. But I do not really know.

the latest.....

She gets a text for an 8 hour day tomarrow. Calls in to accept... literally less than 3 minutes later...

"oh, sorry, I sent the text to 3 people and someone accepted already"

this is the great American. Capitalism at it's zenith.

Unions are evil.

Poor folks are lazy.

My youngest had a similar experience this summer.

Complete different industry. Just treated like trash. She missed practices (for freakin Olympic qualifying no less) and pro amp games yet would be sent home after an hour from an 8 hour schedule or be called last minute and told not to come in at all.

Wound up making 56 dollars on the summer and was tied up for weeks.

Something is very wrong in America.

Not to be Mr. obvious here but your friend really needs a new gig. Even working for min wage somewhere would pay more than this scam of a job..

I would look for a new agency if possible without quitting the old one....
if she could get better hours with a new one and then use the other one for some random hours it would be good in that she would have two sources of income...

I would imagine other agencies probably pull the same shit....her co-workers probably know the good places.

I am under the suspicion that Medicare and Medicaid pay these agencies to provide home care, and they in turn try to maximize their overhead by low balling on wages and hours.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/court-re...-care-workers/

Here is the reason: FDR's Fair Labor And Standards Act exempted domestic service from wage regulations, and home health care workers are considered domestic servants instead of regular employees. That is why they are not paid very well. Obama's Labor Department has tried to shore up protections for home health care workers but a Federal judge overturned that action, but that has been reversed on appeal.

What we really need is a Democratic Congress.

I have heard this as well from some in the industry. It is a hard job.