The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin granted final approval today of a $493,984.81 class action settlement against SDX Home Care Operations LLC. The settlement provides unpaid wages to 961 Home Care Workers, Personal Care Workers, Registered Nurses, and/or Certified Nursing Assistants employed by SDX Home Care Operations between March 18, 2015 and February 17, 2017. SDX Home Care Operations operates Comfort Keepers locations in Wisconsin and provides in home senior care and elder care services. The employees – who were represented by Hawks Quindel attorneys Larry A. Johnson, Summer H. Murshid, and Timothy P. Maynard – complained that SDX Home Care Operations failed to pay them for the time they spent traveling between clients’ homes.
The Fair Labor Standards Act requires an employer to pay for travel time between work locations that is all in a day’s work. While normal home to work travel is not compensable, where an employee arrives at a location, begins working, and then travels to another location to continue working, that travel time must be paid by the employer. While this type of violation is frequent in the home care industry, other types of workers are denied their fair day’s pay when their employers fail to pay for their travel time.
In addition to her recovery of unpaid wages, the employee who brought the action on behalf of her co-workers was awarded an additional payment of $10,000 for her efforts in obtaining a class-wide recovery. The case was filed in the Eastern District of Wisconsin as Case No. 1:16-cv-00493.
If you have any questions about whether your travel time should be paid, or any other questions relating to how you are paid, contact the wage and hour attorneys at Hawks Quindel, S.C. at (414) 271-8650 or contact the attorneys on this case at:
- Larry A. Johnson – ljohnson@hq-law.com
- Summer H. Murshid – smurshid@hq-law.com
- Timothy P. Maynard – tmaynard@hq-law.com
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