PHILADELPHIA - A Pennsylvania judge has ruled in favor of a group of health care workers seeking to file a class action lawsuit over what they say is their employer's failure to pay overtime wages.
The motion to proceed as a collective action was filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on Sept. 5 by Tracy Charles, Shanna Griffin and Antonio Simon. The trio work for Progressions Behavioral Health Services and Progressions Companies. They claim the company failed to pay them overtime that was due, in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
On Oct. 9, District Judge John Padova ruled any employee who worked or is presently employed with Progressions in the role of "behavioral health worker and/or therapeutic staff support who worked at least thirty-two (32) hours of 'billable work in two (2) or more workweeks from July 15, 2014 to the present" is eligible to enter into the class action lawsuit.
Attorneys for Progressions argued against the motion, saying the claim should be contingent upon each employee's "individualized circumstances," and stated the claim under FLSA should be limited to a two-year statute of limitations. But the court ruled that anyone employed from July 2014 would qualify to be included in the class action.
Charles, Griffin and Simon are current employees working as behavioral health workers and therapeutic staff support for Progressions' client School Therapeutic Services Department. The company provides clinical health behavioral services for the School Therapeutic Services Department in the Behavioral Health Rehabilitation Services Department, helping to implement treatment plans, according to the complaint.
The trio claim they worked more than 40 hours per week but had not been paid overtime wages "of 1.5 times their regular rate of pay for those hours they worked in excess of 40 per week." They claim that Progressions "calculated their hours in the two positions separately for overtime purposes," the ruling says.
Normally, those hours would have been calculated in their two positions. Additionally, the trio claim that Progressions failed to pay them for hours they deemed "non-billable" such as travel time, mandatory job training, submitting reports and completing paperwork, all in violation of the FLSA.
According to court documents, Progressions sent a "policy and procedure memorandum" out in April 2017 stating that "employees would be able to begin documenting their time spent performing 'non-billable activities' through a program called Etime, beginning on May 20, 2017."
The compensation would be at a rate of $7.50 per hour for all time considered to be "non-billable." Additionally, an email was sent out in April 2017 stating the company's plan to "institute a new payroll process."
At that same time, the company sent out checks they claimed were "compensation" for "certain hours recorded beyond a 40 hour workweek” for which they had been paid straight time rather than time and a half “from April 4, 2015 through the present date.” But the trio claim those checks did not include any overtime pay for the billable work they had performed or damages under the FLSA.