A class action lawsuit accuses U.S. Nursing of failing to properly pay its workers under California labor law.
The lead plaintiffs, Heidi Rubel and Olga Malysheva, worked as traveling nurses for the company, according to the lawsuit, originally filed in Kern County Superior Court and later transferred to U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.
"Defendants have had a practice of failing to include the value of their travel stipends, including meals, incidentals, and lodging, whether paid in cash or in kind, in Plaintiffs and other non-exempt employees regular rates of pay when calculating overtime or double time wages," the lawsuit alleges.
The travel stipends are ”not intended to reimburse their employees for their travel expenses, but are, in fact, a form of disguised wages," the suit says.
In determining overtime pay, the company also has failed to include pay for the times nurses are on call, according to the lawsuit. Nurses were also not compensated for their time in completing required training classes, the suit says.
"Under California law, the time spent attending these training/orientation courses is compensable because, among other things, they are not voluntary and are directly related to employees’ jobs as they are designed to make employees handle their jobs more effectively as opposed to training them for another job or a new or additional skill," the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit seeks back wages, penalties and legal fees.
The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys Ashkan Shakouri and Sharon Lin, of Shakouri Law Firm, of Los Angeles.
Rubel v. U.S. Nursing Corp, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, 1:23-cv-01664