A New Hampshire home-care provider must pay roughly $1 million in back wages and damages after denying overtime wages to 36 employees.
The Labor Department sued Your Comfort Zone, based in Lebanon, and its president, Rosalind Godfrey, alleging it paid straight-time wages for workers' hours over 40 a workweek between April 2020 and August 2022, according to a July 11 department release.
A consent judgment filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire requires the defendants to pay $950,000 in back wages, $50,000 in punitive damages and $36,324 in civil money penalties for willfully violating the Fair Labor Standards Act. The court also prohibited the company from retaliating or threatening any adverse action against employees for asserting their rights.
According to the release, this is the second time the company and its president have violated the Fair Labor Standards Act. In 2018, two investigations resulted in a $100,055 recovery of back wages owed to 25 employees.