U.S. Labor Dep’t sues Filipino care home owners for wage theft

A San Miguel Care Homes facility in Union City, California.

SAN FRANCISCO–Having exhausted all attempts to reach a settlement, the U.S. Department of Labor on Friday, December 4, sued a Filipino-owned Silicon Valley residential care provider charging the owners with gross violations of federal wage and hour regulations.

The department’s Solicitor’s Office filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Northern California against the owners of San Miguel Homes for the Elderly, LLC, who operate three residential care facilities for the elderly in Union City.

Listed as defendants in the lawsuit are Precilla San Miguel and her two sons, Teofilo Cris Sanque and Ryan San Miguel. Precilla San Miguel resides in Union City, California, and is president and 60-percent owner and a manager of San Miguel Homes for the Elderly, LLC.

Before approximately June 2014, she owned the facilities and Quality In Home Care as a sole proprietorship and operated them with her two sons, co-defendants Teofilo Cris Sanque and Ryan San Miguel.

The Department of Labor is seeking to recover the back wages and damages owed to 22 employees for the substantial hours worked at substandard pay. All the employees are Filipino.

The department accuses the defendants of having either paid the workers for only eight hours of work per day, or paid them a flat daily rate that did not account for all hours worked.  As a result, the workers’ hourly rate has been less than the federal minimum wage.

Specifically, the workers employed in the facilities routinely work and have worked more than 40 hours per week, but defendants have not compensated them at time and one-half the regular rate at which they were employed for all hours worked in excess of 40.

In many work weeks, defendants failed to keep any records at all of the hours worked by the workers employed in the facilities. In other work weeks, defendants failed to keep accurate and complete records of the hours worked by those employees.

The department’s Wage and Hour Division continues to see problems in the residential care field, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Earlier this year, the department announced that it had returned more than $6.8 million in overtime and minimum wage back wages and damages to Bay Area residential care workers from 2011 through 2014.

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