Tag: 2021 News

The Labor Commissioner’s Office has cited Green Messengers Inc. and Amazon.com Services LLC $6.4 million for wage theft violations affecting 718 workers. The Santa Ana-based contractor delivered packages for Amazon.com Services in Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties.

The Labor Commissioner’s Office opened an investigation in June 2019 after receiving a report of labor law violations indicating Green Messenger workers were experiencing wage theft because they were not paid properly and did not receive correct pay statements.

Green Messengers provided delivery services for Amazon.com.

The investigation found that from April 2018 to January 2020, delivery drivers were scheduled to work 10-hour workdays and required to finish an Amazon delivery route in those 10 hours using Green Messenger or Amazon vehicles.

Due to the number of deliveries, drivers often had to work through their meal and rest breaks, and were not paid properly for the extra time when they had to work 11 or more hours to complete the route. This resulted in frequent minimum wage, overtime, meal break, rest period and split-shift violations.

The citations total $6,454,110, with $5,304,768 owed to the 718 workers. The amount payable to workers includes $3,377,988 in liquidated damages and waiting time penalties, $762,850 in penalty assessments for not providing proper wage statements, $882,735 for split-shift, meal and rest break premiums, and $281,195 for minimum wage, overtime and contract wages.

Green Messengers and Amazon.com Services are responsible for the amounts due to workers according to California’s client-employer liability law, in effect since 2015. The law holds client-employers that obtain labor from a subcontractor liable for their workplace violations.

The citations issued to Green Messengers Inc. include $1,149,342 in civil penalties payable to the state.

The companies have appealed the citations. Under the appeal procedure, the Labor Commissioner’s Office will hold a hearing before a Hearing Officer who will affirm, modify or dismiss the citations.

More than a third of employers have fielded complaints from workers related to COVID-19, and claims involving the Americans with Disabilities Act have jumped since last summer, according to a survey of employers released by Blank Rome LLP on Wednesday.

Blank Rome’s report, based on a February survey of 130 executives, human resources leaders, and in-house and general counsel, said that 34% of respondents had gotten COVID-19-related complaints. That’s up from 21% in July and just 12% in March 2020, the firm said, adding that ADA claims climbed from 4% in July to 8%.

And while the overwhelming majority of the company leaders – 87% – are in favor of taking the COVID-19 vaccine themselves, only 15% said they would require workers to get the jab. Meanwhile, 39% of respondents said they would not require employees to be vaccinated, and the rest were undecided.

When it comes to asking workers if they have been vaccinated, 41% answered that they plan to do so, though half remained unsure.

When it comes to the potentially risky practice of incentivizing the shots, just 10% of respondents said they would, while 34% said they won’t and the rest had yet to decide, according to the report.

“Employers are waiting to see how it all shakes out,” Susan Bickley, a Blank Rome partner and study co-authors aid, adding that employers might be able to encourage workers to get vaccines without instituting mandates or structured incentive programs. “There’s been some conflicting signals.”

While the report showed a steady rise in complaints from employees, it also showed that nearly three-quarters of them don’t fall into traditional categories for employment claims, such as discrimination, retaliation, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration complaints.

Employers have widely adopted medical screening requirements for on-site workers, which could be a driver of the increasing employee complaints, the report said. The majority of the surveyed employers have increased cleaning, social distancing requirements and associated signage. Roughly 97% require masks, a figure that has risen since the summer.

Three-quarters of employers allow their employees to work from home, and only 28% have three-quarters or more of their employees on site. Most continue to refrain from instituting workplace liability waivers.

Additionally, 78% of employers have faced increased requests for paid time off. And around 40% have seen increased requests for time off under the Family and Medical Leave Act or unpaid leave.

But those requests haven’t had too much of an impact on typical time-off eligibility. Around 60% of the employers haven’t made changes to PTO offerings, and just 6% have given parents of young children more PTO.

In April, more than half of employers had avoided taking employee-related cost-cutting measures, such as layoffs and furloughs. That number has dropped as the pandemic has raged on; now, just 31% have managed to evade those outcomes.

“This was the first survey where employers are feeling somewhat hopeful,” Iley said. “We got some positive comments. People are coming out of the difficult decisions.”

Medicare reimbursement policies for outpatient services have encouraged physician integration with hospitals, according to a new study and commentary published in Health Services Research.

An article on MedPageToday claims that’s in part because Medicare reimbursement for physician services, on average, would have been $114,000 higher per physician per year for those who were integrated with a hospital, researchers found.

For primary care alone, reimbursement would have been $63,000 higher per physician per year for those who were integrated with a hospital. For medical specialties, the average reimbursement difference was $178,000, and for surgical specialties, it was $150,000.

The reimbursement difference per specialty ranged from $363,000 for urology to $15,000 for psychiatry, according to the study.

“These numbers are astonishing,” healthcare technology consultant Dan O’Neill, MA, MS, tweeted. O’Neill is the former senior vice president and general manager of Change Healthcare and a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health policy fellow.

“The incentives and waste here are just … incredible. As in, incredibly destructive,” O’Neill tweeted. “Just imagine how much worse this is for commercial payers, given the 200% to 400% markups (over Medicare) in hospital outpatient departments.”

Post and colleagues also found a modest association between a higher payment differential and the probability of integrating with a hospital. The effect was larger among primary care physicians and medical specialists, but not statistically significant among surgeons, they found.

Post also tweeted about the potential effects of vertical integration: “While integration is associated with higher prices, current evidence suggests a limited association with quality,” he wrote. “As a result, we’re not crazy about encouraging more of it.”

There are several reasons the study has garnered attention, Michael Chernew, PhD, professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School and author of the study’s corresponding commentary, told MedPage Today.

“There’s an enormous amount of concern about healthcare prices in this country,” Chernew said. And much of the concern about high prices is because of consolidation.

Additionally, there is interest in Medicare spending, he said. One issue that has an impact on that is site-neutral payments.  “This study links them together in a way that is both interesting and policy-relevant,” Chernew said.

Robert Piontkowski, an employee of Chevron, was seriously injured on the job at the company’s El Segundo refinery when he was splashed with super-heated materials. Plaintiff subsequently received workers’ compensation benefits for the injuries he sustained.

Piontkowski claims he was injured because a pipe that would normally have drained those materials in a different manner was plugged.

Chevron had a services agreement with Veolia Environmental Services, Inc. to hydroblast such pipes at Chevron’s direction. Plaintiff also alleged that a few days prior to the accident, Chevron requested that Veolia unplug the drain line. At the time of the accident, Veolia had not yet reported to unplug the line.

Plaintiff filed this negligence action against Veolia alleging Veolia owed him a duty, as a third-party beneficiary of the services agreement, to timely respond to a request from Chevron to clean the drainpipe at issue and, further, that Veolia’s failure to clean the pipe caused the condition that led to his injury.

The trial court granted Veolia ES Industrial Services, Inc.’s motion for summary judgment, finding as a matter of law that plaintiff could not establish that Veolia owed him a legal duty of care. Plaintiff appealed. Finding no error, the court of appeal affirmed the judgment of the trial court in the unpublished case of Piontkowski v. Veolia ES Industrial Services, Inc.

In considering whether a party has a legal duty in a particular factual situation, a distinction is drawn between claims of liability based upon misfeasance and those based upon nonfeasance.

Misfeasance exists when the defendant is responsible for making the plaintiff’s position worse, i.e., defendant has created a risk. Liability for misfeasance is based on the general duty of ordinary care to prevent others from being injured by one’s conduct.

Conversely, nonfeasance is found when the defendant has failed to aid plaintiff through beneficial intervention. Liability for misfeasance is based on the general duty of ordinary care to prevent others from being injured by one’s conduct. Liability for nonfeasance is limited to situations in which there is a special relationship that creates a duty to act.

The basic idea is often referred to as the “no duty to aid rule,” which remains a fundamental and long-standing rule of tort law. As a rule, one has no duty to come to the aid of another. A person who has not created a peril is not liable in tort merely for failure to take affirmative action to assist or protect another unless there is some relationship between them which gives rise to a duty to act.

The services agreement was not intended to benefit Chevron’s employees nor was it focused on providing a safe work environment for them. Rather, it is plain from the agreement that Veolia’s services were intended to benefit Chevron by keeping its refineries and equipment operating smoothly.

A federal grand jury returned an indictment charging two defendants in a scheme that targeted California Employment Development Department unemployment insurance benefits that were intended for Californians hit hardest by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.

The three-count indictment charges Jason Vertz, 51, of Fresno, and Alana Powers, 45, an inmate at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, with one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and two counts of aggravated identity theft.

The indictment was unsealed and Vertz was arraigned on Tuesday following his arrest.

According to court documents, Vertz and Powers submitted several fraudulent unemployment insurance claims in Powers’ and other Central California Women’s Facility inmates’ names to EDD.

Recorded jail calls and emails show that Powers and other inmates, provided names, dates of birth, and social security numbers for inmates at Central California Women’s Facility to Vertz to submit the fraudulent claims. Shortly thereafter, the benefits were loaded onto debit cards that were mailed to the addresses the defendants provided.

The underlying applications for the claims stated that the inmates had worked within the prescribed period as maids, cleaners, fabrication welders, and other occupations, and that they were available to work, which was not true because they were incarcerated.

The claims would have been denied if accurate answers had been given. EDD and the United States have suffered an actual loss of over $103,000 as a result of the fraud.

This case is the product of an investigation by the FBI, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Investigative Services Unit, and the California EDD.

If convicted of the conspiracy to commit mail fraud, Vertz and Powers each face a maximum statutory penalty of 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

If convicted of the aggravated identity theft, they face a mandatory two-year sentence consecutive to any other sentence.