Nine Nursing Homes. Twelve Years. Still No Justice.
In 2012, workers at Connecticut nursing home facilities operated by Care One LLC and its affiliate HealthBridge Management LLC filed federal labor complaints. The company’s response was not to fix anything. It was to spend over a decade fighting the government’s right to even hold a hearing about what it allegedly did. This is that story.
The Numbers That Tell the Story
Who Is Care One? Know Your Opponent.
Care One LLC operates through a network of affiliated shell-style operating companies, each named after a street address, each doing business under a friendlier name. This corporate structure, common in the nursing home industry, makes it harder to hold a single entity accountable. Here are the nine facilities named in federal proceedings:
These are not factories making useless ass widgets that nobody actually likes. They are places where elderly and disabled people live, where workers bathe, feed, and comfort people who cannot do it themselves. The workers who filed labor complaints in 2012 showed up every day while their employer spent millions on lawyers to argue that the judge who heard their case was appointed wrong.
The Delay Machine: A Documented Timeline
The unfair labor practice complaints filed against Care One in 2012 have never received a final resolution. Here is a documented timeline of how the company used the court system to stretch that out across more than a decade:
The Visual Proof: How Delay Became the Strategy
Magenta bars = corporate-created delays. Cyan bars = active proceedings. Yellow bar = still unresolved.
Legal Receipts: What the Courts Actually Said
The following are direct citations from the court record. They are presented here because the workers and the public deserve to know exactly what language the legal system used and what arguments Care One made with its lawyers.
Irreparable harm is the single most important prerequisite for the issuance of a preliminary injunction.
// Second Circuit, quoting JTH Tax, LLC v. Agnant, 62 F.4th 658 (2d Cir. 2023) — The court’s core standard for stopping an ongoing government process.Care One is not now, and will never again be, before ALJ Chu in any NLRB proceedings, as he has now retired from the agency.
// Second Circuit, Care One v. NLRB, No. 23-7475 (2026) — The court’s direct response to Care One’s argument that the retired judge’s past appointment still harmed them.Unconstitutional removal protections primarily implicate accountability for, not authority to take, official actions.
// Second Circuit, Care One v. NLRB, No. 23-7475 (2026) — Rejecting Care One’s argument that ALJ job protections made his rulings invalid.It is not within our purview to anticipate whether the Supreme Court may one day overrule its existing precedent… Only if, and until, a century of settled law is upended by the Supreme Court, our task in deciding Plaintiffs’ merits arguments remains straightforward. We can and should reject them for what they are: without merit.
// Judge Pérez, concurring, Care One v. NLRB, No. 23-7475 (2026) — A concurring judge going further than the majority to call Care One’s constitutional arguments substantively weak.Plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits of their constitutional challenges.
// Judge Pérez, concurring, Care One v. NLRB, No. 23-7475 (2026)The Non-Financial Ledger: What Numbers Cannot Capture
Courts talk about “irreparable harm” as a legal concept. But there is another kind of harm that never appears in a legal brief. It shows up in people’s lives.
Societal Impact Mapping: This Is Not Just One Case
The Nursing Home Industry and Labor Power
The nursing home industry is one of the largest employers of low-wage workers in the United States. Workers in this industry, disproportionately women and workers of color, face high injury rates, chronic understaffing, low wages, and limited collective bargaining power. When companies like Care One use extended legal delay as a labor strategy, it does not just harm the workers at nine Connecticut facilities. It sends a signal to the entire industry: the financial and time cost of fighting federal labor accountability can be made larger than the cost of complying with labor law. That math only works if you have resources workers do not.
Economic Inequality in the Courtroom
Care One retained Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, a major New York law firm, to run this litigation. Workers who originally filed complaints in 2012 relied on the NLRB’s General Counsel to represent the public interest on their behalf. They have no personal legal representation in these proceedings. The resource gap between a nursing home corporation and its workers is not an accident of the system. In many ways, it is the system.
Care One’s argument, that a constitutional technicality about ALJ appointments should void a decade of proceedings, is the kind of argument that takes significant legal expertise and significant billable hours to assemble. The workers who filed those 2012 complaints could not have mounted such a counter-offensive if the roles were reversed. That asymmetry defines American labor law in practice, regardless of what it says on paper.
The Weapons of Procedural Law
What Care One did is technically legal. Filing appeals is a right. Arguing constitutional questions is a right. But the court record shows that Care One did not raise its “unconstitutional judge appointment” argument until 2023, nine years after the Supreme Court ruling (Noel Canning) that it claims made ALJ Chu’s 2012 appointment invalid. The Second Circuit noted this, and noted that the appointment had been ratified by a lawfully constituted Board in 2014.
The timing matters. The constitutional argument was raised as proceedings were about to resume after a long delay, not when the alleged constitutional defect was first known. That is a pattern. That is strategy. The legal system allowed it for over a decade.
Public Health Implications
Unfair labor practices in nursing homes are not abstract governance failures. When workers are afraid to report unsafe conditions, when understaffing complaints go unaddressed, when workers are retaliated against for organizing, the people who pay the ultimate price are residents: elderly and disabled people who cannot advocate for themselves. A company that fights federal labor oversight for twelve years is not a company that prioritizes the workers who care for residents. The two things are connected.
The Cost of a Life: What Legal Fees Could Have Bought
We do not have access to Care One’s legal billing records. But we can reason from public data. Major firm litigation of this complexity, across multiple courts over multiple years, routinely costs millions of dollars. The Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP firm represents major corporations and commands premium rates.
Put simply: the money spent by Care One to fight accountability in court could have paid over 100 full years of a nursing home worker’s salary. That is a choice. Every dollar spent on lawyers to delay a labor ruling is a dollar that was not spent on wages, staffing, or safety.
What Now: Your Watchlist and Your Next Move
The Board has not yet issued its final decision. When it does, Care One can appeal that decision to a federal circuit court. This case may not be over. Here is what to watch and how to act.
- Chief Executive Officer, Care One LLC — The person who sets the legal strategy and authorizes the expenditure of resources on litigation rather than labor compliance.
- General Counsel / Legal Department, Care One LLC — The team that designed and executed a 12-year legal obstruction strategy across three federal venues.
- Board of Directors / Ownership Group, Care One LLC and HealthBridge Management LLC — The people who profit from operations at these nine facilities and who approve company strategy.
- Facility Administrators at All Nine Named Locations — The on-the-ground leadership responsible for day-to-day labor practices at each facility.
- NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) — The agency still processing this case. When the Board issues its final order, watch for Care One’s next move. Public docket: Healthbridge Mgmt. LLC et al., No. 34-CA-070823.
- Connecticut Department of Public Health — Licenses and regulates these nine nursing home facilities. Has separate oversight authority over staffing, safety, and resident care.
- Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — These facilities almost certainly receive federal reimbursement. CMS publishes nursing home inspection data at Medicare.gov/care-compare.
- Connecticut Office of the Attorney General — Has authority to investigate consumer protection and elder care issues in the state.
- OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) — Nursing homes are among the most injury-prone workplaces in the country. Workers can file confidential complaints.
- If you work at one of these facilities: You have the right to organize, the right to talk with coworkers about working conditions, and the right to file NLRB complaints. Contact 1-844-762-6572 (NLRB Info) or nlrb.gov.
- If you have a family member at one of these facilities: Check CMS Care Compare ratings at medicare.gov/care-compare. File a complaint with the Connecticut Long Term Care Ombudsman if you observe problems.
- Support local healthcare worker unions: SEIU 1199NE has historically represented nursing home workers in Connecticut. Local unions are the primary defense against these tactics.
- Mutual aid and community organizing: The legal system moves slowly, especially when corporations have lawyers. Community pressure, organized workers, and public attention move faster. Share this investigation.
- Watch the NLRB docket: When the Board issues its final decision in Healthbridge Mgmt. LLC et al., No. 34-CA-070823, the details of what Care One actually did to workers will be public record. We will cover it.
The court system handed Care One twelve years. It did not give workers twelve years of wages lost to unfair practices. The Board’s final order, whenever it comes, is not the finish line. Accountability is what happens after the order, in the real world, with real pressure from real people.
SOURCE DOCUMENT: Care One, LLC v. NLRB, No. 23-7475-cv (2d Cir. Feb. 5, 2026). All facts in this investigation are drawn directly from the court record. Salary comparison based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data for Nursing Assistants and Orderlies (SOC 31-1014). Legal cost estimates are illustrative and based on published industry billing rate ranges; Care One’s actual legal expenditures are not public. EvilCorporations.com conducts evidence-based investigations into corporate misconduct. We do not invent names, figures, or allegations. Where information was not in the source material, we used placeholders or stated the limitation directly.
© EvilCorporations.com | Series: The Long Game | Published: 2026
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