The Labor Department ordered North Sunflower Medical Center in Ruleville, Miss., to pay $201,436 in back wages to workers, including nurses, after department investigators found the hospital illegally deducted hours worked and failed to pay required overtime.
The facility, which employs about 500 people, owed $201,436 in missing wages to 110 workers, the Labor Department said in a Feb. 28 news release. It did not immediately respond to requests from Mississippi Today for comment. Becker's has also reached out to the hospital and will update the story if a comment is received.
North Sunflower Medical Center automatically deducted 30-minute lunch breaks from some workers' hours without ensuring they were free of work-related tasks and able to step away from their jobs, the Labor Department said.
"Investigators learned that, several times a week, some of the facility's nurses need to work through lunch breaks to update patient records," the department added. "By automatically deducting 30-minute lunch breaks, the employer failed to account for all the hours that the nurses worked, which led to violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act's overtime provisions."
The department also said it found that the facility failed to combine employees' hours when they worked in different departments; did not use the total number of hours worked when calculating additional half-time rates owed to these workers; and did not maintain an accurate record of hours worked for employees.