A federal investigation has recovered $950,000 in back wages and liquidated damages and $50,000 in punitive damages from a West Lebanon, New Hampshire home healthcare business — with a history of unlawful pay practices — that denied overtime wages to 36 employees.
According to investigators with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, between April 2020 and August 2022, Your Comfort Zone Inc. and its president, Rosalind Godfrey, paid home care workers in New Hampshire and Vermont straight-time rates for the workers’ hours over 40 in a workweek.
In addition to its recovery of wages and liquidated damages, the division assessed and the employer has paid $36,324 in civil money penalties for willful violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act‘s overtime requirements.
A related consent judgment and order, entered in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire, requires Godfrey and the business to pay $50,000 in punitive damages to certain employees and also permanently prohibits them from violating the FLSA’s anti-retaliation requirements. Among other things, the order enjoins them from retaliating, and taking or threatening any adverse action against any current or former employees because they asserted their rights under the FLSA. View the consent judgment.
According to prosecutors, this is not the first time that Your Comfort Zone Inc. and Godfrey have run afoul of federal wage laws. In two 2018 investigations, the division identified violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act and recovered $100,055 in overtime wages owed to 25 employees. The division later learned the employer allegedly coerced some affected workers into kicking back the money. In October 2022, the department obtained a consent preliminary injunction in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire forbidding the company and Godfrey from interfering with the current investigation.
“Your Comfort Zone’s repeated shortchanging of its employees is egregious and illegal and deprives people who provide valuable and necessary care in our communities of the hard-earned overtime wages they need to support themselves and their families,” said Wage and Hour Division District Director Steven McKinney in Manchester, New Hampshire.
The division’s Manchester district office conducted the investigation. The Boston office litigated the case and obtained the consent judgment.
The FLSA requires that most employees in the U.S. be paid at least the federal minimum wage for all hours worked and overtime pay at not less than time and one-half the required rate of pay for all hours worked over 40 in a workweek.
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