Did you work for Orthopedic and Neurological Rehabilitation (ONR) at some point during the past few years? Those who currently hold or previously held the position of Director of Rehabilitation (DOR), or any joint position of therapist and DOR, any time in the past 3 years up to the present may be eligible to join a collective action case seeking to help with recovery of overtime wages that ONR failed to pay.
The plaintiffs are using this class-action lawsuit to seek compensation the company owes them for unpaid overtime. We believe Orthopedic and Neurological Rehab is violating the Federal Overtime wage law in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) through the wage practices they are following for employees in DOR positions.
We are alleging through our lawsuit that Orthopedic and Neurological Rehab failed to pay overtime wages to Directors of Rehabilitation. All collective action members were wrongly classified as exempt from overtime. ONR also took impermissible deductions from DOR salaries for absences that were less than a full day, particularly when the number of patients they treated would cause them to limit billable Medicare hours.
Productivity Requirements
ONR has a practice of productivity requirements for billable treatment and Medicare hours, reaching upwards of 60% of total daily work hours. This left no time for 30-minute uninterrupted off duty meal periods and rest breaks. ONR also has a policy against reporting overtime hours and even threatened disciplinary action against employees who claimed such hours. Yet, they were required to complete all management and director job duties, to treat patients and complete all reporting and medical notes related to treatment. They were pressured to work hours off-the-clock to accomplish these tasks, rather than report actual hours worked.
These policies and practices led our plaintiff to submit either only enough hours to avoid failing the productivity requirement, or the report inaccurate hours so the maximum would not exceed 40 hours in a workweek.
What We Seek to Recover for Our Affected Employees
We believe that all affected employees working in DOR positions for ONR throughout the U.S. should have an eligibility to recover all allowable compensation. These damages should include: minimum wages and overtime wages, penalties and premium pay for missed meal and rest periods, restitution and restoration of sums owed, and any attorney’s fees and costs.
DETAILS ABOUT ORTHOPEDIC AND NEUROLOGICAL REHAB’S FAILURE TO PAY OWED OVERTIME WAGES
CASE: Faith Fermin-Hayes, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated, v. Orthopaedic and Neurological Rehabilitation Inc. and Orthopaedic & Neurological Rehabilitation, Speech Pathology Inc. in violation of Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) overtime wage laws.
The lawsuit alleges that Ms. Fermin-Hayes routinely worked overtime hours without being paid anything for these hours, and that she was discouraged from even reporting the overtime hours worked. More importantly, when her work hours fell below 40, ONR cut and reduced her salary, unlawfully and impermissibly deducting hours from her salary in violation of the salary pay laws of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and California’s wage laws.
As Fermin-Hayes and the lawsuit allege, ONR has thus forfeited their right to classify all DOR as exempt from overtime pay, and must now pay her and all similarly situated DOR all the overtime wages owed for all hours worked in the preceding 4 years in California, and for all others in the USA, for the preceding 3 years, plus double the wages owed as liquidated damages, in addition to paying attorney’s fees.
Additionally, Fermin-Hayes claims that she and all other DORs worked without taking bona fide meal breaks — meaning uninterrupted, non-working meal breaks of at least 30 minutes — as she had to work during these breaks. This lawsuit as well seeks to recover as provided for in California law, 1 hour of pay for each instance she and any DOR did not have at least a full 30 minute of non-working, uninterrupted meal break for the day, plus double in liquidated damages.
To learn more about this case, click here.
Representing Victims of Unfair FLSA Practices
At Feldman Legal Group, we frequently represent employees as plaintiffs in cases involving FLSA collective actions regarding non-payment of overtime. Some of the employees we represented in past cases, as well as in currently pending cases, worked at companies including Select Rehabilitation, Reliant Rehab, Strada Services, Verizon Connect, Cogent Communications, NinjaOne and NinjaRMM, Fleetcor Technologies, Total Insurance Brokers, Accenture, Managed Labor Solutions, Partsbase, Knight Enterprises, and others in similar FLSA collective actions.
Because of the practices of these companies, we believe that employees did not receive the overtime wages they earned. According to the federal FLSA and state wage laws, any non-exempt employees should receive a premium in wages for hours they work beyond the standard 40-hour work week.
Companies try to work around these overtime payment requirements by misrepresenting the responsibilities or titles of the employees or by outright forcing employees not to report overtime hours. Through our work on this case, we believe that Orthopedic and Neurological Rehab is purposefully requiring employees to work off the clock.
Orthopedic and Neurological Rehab’s Violations of the FLSA
At Feldman Legal Group, we would like to discuss with present and past Directors of Rehabilitation at Orthopedic and Neurological Rehab regarding the company’s unfair overtime payment practices. Please contact us to discuss your situation.
Through our investigation, we believe that Orthopedic and Neurological Rehab did not give credit for overtime to its DORs who:
Worked through all or part of the 30-minute lunch break time
Did not report hours worked if doing so meant they would not meet productivity requirements.
Worked hours before or after the official end of the workday
We are alleging that ONR frequently expected and encouraged the employees to work hours beyond the 40-hour week without recording these hours as overtime. The company’s unwritten and de facto policy of no overtime hours allowed, while expecting the employees to hit unreasonable productivity requirements, left employees with no choice but to work off the clock to complete the expected level of work.
Our Investigation of ONR’s Practices
While investigating the case involving our representative plaintiff, we learned that many ONR Directors of Rehabilitation routinely worked through the lunch break and through mandatory 10-minute uninterrupted off-duty rest periods. The company expected the DORs to work off the clock. If they reported any overtime hours, ONR would either shave or edit off the hours themselves or command the DORs to do so.
The company expected our representative plaintiff and other DORs to hit productivity requirements, regardless of whether these required tasks would require more than 40 hours in any week. Her productivity expectation was for patient treatment of 70% of her hours so that she could reach Medicare billable hours. For example, if a DOR were to report 10 hours worked for a day, she or he would have to also document and bill for 7 hours of patient therapy time. Failing to meet productivity requirements would subject a DOR to disciplinary action.
Under this scheme, a DOR could not report all of their overtime hours because most of the time, the billable therapy hours would not meet the Medicare requirement. To avoid failing the productivity requirement, our plaintiff would submit either only enough hours or self-report inaccurate and understated electronic time sheet so the maximum hours would not exceed 40 in any workweek.
In the majority of weeks, our representative plaintiff had to work multiple hours off the clock to meet the requirements. Our plaintiff was required to routinely attend meetings and training sessions and perform non-therapy Director responsibilities which negatively impacted her productivity requirement. But she was still expected to meet that requirement, even when it meant not reporting all these hours worked related to her responsibilities as a DOR.
ONR classified and treated Directors of Rehabilitation as salaried, exempt employees, who would, by law, no be entitled to overtime pay. But, when our plaintiff worked fewer than 40 hours in a workweek or did not have enough patients to report 40 hours of work, ONR treated our plaintiff and other DORs as hourly paid employees. That way, they deducted pay from their “salaries” in violation of FLSA wage laws for administrative and executive exempt employees.
Compensation We Seek from ONR
We are demanding that Orthopedic and Neurological Rehab to now pay for these extra hours that the employees worked, or that the company knew or should have known that the employees worked, at 1.5 times the regular rate of pay, as required under FLSA.
Get Help from Our Attorneys If You Believe You Weren’t Paid for Overtime
If you also worked under these conditions, our team would like to speak with you. We would like to gather more information on ONR’s practices regarding denying overtime pay to employees in the position of Directors of Rehabilitation.
Please contact us for a 10- or 15-minute phone call about your experiences with ONR and about your beliefs regarding any FLSA violations the company performed. You are under no obligation to join the lawsuit or to work with us after this telephone call.
HAVE YOU WORKED AS A DIRECTOR OF REHABILITATION AT ORTHOPEDIC AND NEUROLOGICAL REHAB?
Feldman Legal Group would like to speak to anyone with information regarding the scheme at Orthopedic and Neurological Rehab to deny Directors of Rehabilitation the ability to earn overtime pay, even though the FLSA shows that they deserve overtime pay. Our attorneys in employment law want to interview you about your experiences with the company if you’ve been in this situation within the past 3 years and, in California, within the past 4 years.
If you believe you deserved overtime wages that you did not receive and were forced to meet productivity requirements even when that meant working overtime hours without pay, please contact us. We would like to set up a time that is convenient for you to discuss your situation and experiences in any of these job positions.
