After a years-long investigation amid a 47,000-claim statewide backlog, the California Labor Commissioner’s office on Thursday ordered Amity In-Home Care Services to pay $2.2 million in unpaid wages and penalties to workers in Long Beach and across the South Bay.
Workers and activists gathered outside the company’s Torrance headquarters Monday to celebrate the ruling and to hand deliver the citation to Amity’s CEO Nancy Reyes.
“Today we come together to celebrate the leadership of these courageous workers who refused to be silenced,” said Romeo Hebron, executive director of the Long Beach-based Filipino Migrant Center. “We’re here to uplift the efforts of the Amity in-home caregivers, whose brave fight against wage theft and labor exploitation has culminated in a monumental investigation and outcome in this case.”
Amity did not respond to an inquiry from the Long Beach Post.
The ruling follows a state investigation into complaints by at least 50 workers who say they were shorted pay and misclassified as contractors from 2020 to 2023. But workers began filing complaints as early as 2019.
They say they regularly worked 12- to 24-hour shifts, often without a break or overtime pay.
Former caregiver Alma Bernal said in the time she worked for Amity from 2019 to 2022 she worked 24-hour shifts without knowing overtime was owed to her.
Checks also routinely bounced due to “insufficient funds,” workers said.
“It got to the point that whenever I went to the bank, my heart would pump so fast wondering if I would be paid on time or not,” said Penafrancia “Precy” Tanuyan, a former Amity caregiver who added she was left paying overdraft fees each time it happened.
Bet Tzedek Legal Services attorney Kelsey Chapple, who provided workers counsel, said the citation covers the cost of “failure to provide minimum wage, overtime, rest and meal breaks,” as well as penalties for willful worker misclassification, a lack of compensation insurance and liquidated damages.
Following their firm’s involvement in the case in April 2023, the state conducted an inspection of the headquarters and issued a stop order due to the “company’s failure to provide workers’ compensation insurance,” according to a statement from the Labor Commissioner’s office.
Advocates celebrated the ruling as it doesn’t happen very often. A state audit last May found the Labor Commissioner’s office had a 47,000-case backlog and an alarming vacancy rate in its Los Angeles and Long Beach branches.
Cases, as a result, take six times longer to resolve than the four months allotted by state law, with the slowest turnaround of investigations in the state field offices of Los Angeles, Oakland and Long Beach.
This is especially grim for in-home positions, experts say, where workers, typically non-English speakers, are often isolated in suburban homes, dependent on bosses for transportation, and cut off from networks of other immigrants, thus depriving them of knowledge about prevailing wages and rights.
Those who do try to collect their debt enter an onerous system where claims are difficult to file and even harder to keep track of once they’re processed. Armando Gudiño, the executive director of the Los Angeles Worker Center Network, said it’s typical for a worker to go to two to four different agencies to file claims, as different forms require different offices.
Some, even after state regulators rule in their favor, never receive the wages employers are ordered to pay. Among those who do receive back wages, only 12% are awarded the full amount, according to state data.
In a release, the state labor commissioner said this citation was the first issued under the 2023 legislation Assembly Bill 594, which bolsters the office’s enforcement tools and allows it to collect unpaid wages payable to affected workers, as opposed to being solely payable to the state.
Advocates hope the case will embolden other employees to come forward if they believe they are being treated unfairly.
“We want the suffering and exploitation of the workers to end,” Bernal said.