HCAOA The Voice Summer 2019

19 Summer 2019 PUBLIC POLICY Labor Department Focus on Worker Misclassification Welcome News to HCAOA On April 24, 2019, Bloomberg Gov- ernment issued an article on how the Labor Department continues to focus on home care companies for minimum wage and overtime pay violations. The focus of the arti- cle was on a recent DOL judgment against a Virginia home care com- pany that department lawyers said misclassified workers as indepen- dent contractors and failed to pay them overtime, and a few other home care related cases. HCAOA Executive Director, Phil Bongiorno, was quoted for the article. “The home care industry continues to seek clarification and guidance from the U.S. Depart- ment of Labor on enforcement of the companion exemption rule,” he stated. “While HCAOA members continue to comply with this rule despite limited guidance, we wel- come the Department’s efforts to enforce worker misclassification regulation for entities that are mis- classifying workers that comes as a result of loopholes in the rule.”