The Five Ways Prestige Stole From Its Workers

This was not one bad policy. The Department of Labor documented a multi-layered system of wage theft, each layer targeting a different part of the workday the company could siphon off without paying for.

• Travel time theft: Prestige’s HHAs traveled between multiple patients’ homes in a single workday. That travel was the core requirement of the job. Prestige paid them nothing for it, treating the time between patients as free labor.
• Short break theft: Federal law has been clear for decades: breaks under 20 minutes must be paid. Prestige’s own president admitted the company compensated breaks taken during client visits. The company then drew an invented line and refused to pay for the identical breaks taken between clients.
• Illegal overtime scheme: Federal law requires overtime pay for every hour worked beyond 40 in a single week. Prestige instead calculated overtime on an 80-hour biweekly system. That calculation is only legal for hospitals and residential care facilities. Prestige is neither. The Department of Labor had already told Prestige this in writing in 2017 after a prior violation.
• Dual-service employee underpayment: Prestige president Alexander Dorfman testified the company used a weighted average pay system for employees who worked at two different pay rates. The company’s own records showed it never actually ran that calculation. Workers were underpaid for overtime as a result.
• Records destruction by negligence: The FLSA requires employers to maintain accurate records of hours worked. Prestige kept records for every employee but systematically omitted travel time from each one. When the government tried to calculate back wages, Prestige had no reliable data to counter the estimates. The court ruled that gap was Prestige’s fault alone.

Seven Years of Getting Away With It: The Timeline

Prestige did not stumble into wage theft. The Department of Labor’s own investigation history shows a company that was warned, informed, and then continued stealing anyway.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What a Stolen Hour Actually Costs

Home health aides are not an abstract workforce category. They are the people who show up before dawn to help someone’s father get out of bed. They are the ones who manage a client’s medications so the client does not end up in an emergency room. They bathe people. They dress people. They sit with people who are dying so those people are not alone. They do this work in strangers’ homes, without supervision, without the protections of a clinical setting, and in many cases for wages that already sit close to the floor.

Now add this: after caring for one patient, they got in their cars and drove to the next one. Maybe across town. Maybe forty-five minutes away in traffic. That drive happened on their own time, by the company’s design. Prestige did not pay for it. Prestige’s president Alexander Dorfman received written guidance from the federal government explaining exactly what the law required. Prestige kept not paying anyway.

Think about what that looks like across a week. An aide works a full caseload, let’s say four or five clients spread across a city. Between each client there is a drive. Maybe it is fifteen minutes. Maybe it is thirty. By the end of the week, those gaps add up to hours, and those hours translated to real wages that never arrived. For workers who make hourly wages doing physically and emotionally demanding labor, the loss of even a few hours’ pay per week is not an inconvenience. It is the difference between making rent and not. It is the difference between buying groceries and deferring them. Home health aides are disproportionately women, disproportionately women of color, and work in one of the most chronically underpaid sectors of American labor. They do not have a financial cushion to absorb stolen wages.

There is something specific about the cruelty of this particular theft. The work these aides were not paid for was travel to the next person who needed care. Prestige built a business model on the premise that the physical movement required to deliver its service, the movement that only existed because Prestige scheduled multiple clients per worker per day, was not worth compensating. The company benefited directly from every mile driven. It simply declined to pay for those miles in time.

And when the government came to count how much was owed, it discovered Prestige had not kept the records that would have made a precise calculation possible. Every employee file, complete in every other respect, was missing travel time. The workers could not prove exactly how much had been taken from them because the person doing the taking had not written it down. The court found that gap was intentional enough to call willful. The workers were left to hope that an approximation would be close enough to justice.

Legal Receipts: What the Court Actually Said

The following quotes are taken directly from the Third Circuit’s January 31, 2025 opinion. They are not paraphrased.

Societal Impact: Who Else Gets Hurt When This Goes Unpunished

Public Health

Home health aides are the connective tissue of the U.S. healthcare system for elderly, disabled, and chronically ill patients. When the workers providing that care are underpaid, the entire system absorbs the damage.

• Wage theft drives turnover in the home health aide workforce. When workers cannot make ends meet on their wages, they leave for other jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics consistently documents home healthcare as one of the highest-turnover sectors in the U.S. economy. Each worker who leaves is a disruption in continuity of care for vulnerable patients who depend on consistent relationships for safe treatment.
• Prestige’s refusal to compensate travel time created a direct financial incentive for aides to cluster clients in the same location rather than serve patients who needed care in more distant or isolated areas. The court noted this explicitly: some aides chose to schedule visits in the same building to avoid unpaid drive time. Patients without neighbors in the same building were functionally less desirable to serve under this model.
• The illegal 80-hour biweekly overtime scheme suppressed the real cost of overworking aides. Workers who hit their legitimate 40-hour limit midweek were financially incentivized to keep accepting shifts, because Prestige’s calculation delayed the overtime threshold. Fatigue in direct patient care settings produces medical errors, missed medication doses, and falls.
• When low-wage healthcare workers are financially destabilized, they defer their own medical care. Research on low-income healthcare workers consistently documents higher rates of untreated chronic illness, which creates both personal health consequences and systemic absences in an already understaffed sector.

Economic Inequality

This case is not an isolated incident. It is a window into a documented pattern of wage suppression targeting some of the most economically vulnerable workers in the American labor market.

• Home health aides are among the lowest-paid workers in the country. The Department of Labor estimates the median annual wage for home health and personal care aides hovers near or just above the poverty line for a family of four. Prestige’s wage theft operated against workers who had no financial margin to absorb losses.
• The workforce is disproportionately composed of women and women of color, populations that already experience the documented gender wage gap and racial wealth gap. Systematic wage theft in this sector compounds generational wealth disparities that already disadvantage these workers before they clock in.
• By refusing to compensate travel time, Prestige effectively transferred the cost of its business model onto its workers. The company collected revenue for every client visit. It declined to pay for the labor required to move between those visits. The economic surplus from that unpaid travel time went directly into Prestige’s operating margins.
• The use of an illegal biweekly overtime scheme after a documented 2017 warning is consistent with a strategy of deliberate non-compliance. The calculation: the cost of non-compliance (a future lawsuit) discounted by the probability of being caught, versus the savings from underpaying overtime every pay period for years. Prestige made that calculation and chose non-compliance.
• Prestige’s failure to keep travel time records was not an administrative oversight. It was the mechanism that made every other violation harder to prosecute. Without records, workers cannot prove what was taken. The government is forced to estimate. Estimates are challenged. Cases settle for less. This is a documented tactic in wage theft enforcement, and it worked in Prestige’s favor until the court ruled that the evidentiary gap was Prestige’s problem to own, not the workers’.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What Now? The Watchlist and Your Next Move

The Third Circuit’s ruling is binding precedent in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Every home care company operating in those states must now comply or face the same outcome Prestige received. Here is who is supposed to make sure that happens, and what you can do if it does not.

Who to Pressure: Named Parties

• Nursing Home Care Management Inc., doing business as Prestige Home Care Agency: The corporate entity found liable. Any current or former HHA who believes they were not compensated for travel time between clients, or for short breaks, may have a claim.
• Alexander Dorfman, President: Named individually as an appellant. He personally received the 2017 DOL compliance guidance and continued the wage theft policies. Individual liability in FLSA cases is well-established.

Regulatory Watchlist

• U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division (WHD): The agency that brought this case. If you are a home health aide who was not paid for travel time or short breaks, file a complaint at dol.gov. The WHD investigates FLSA violations and can recover back wages on your behalf at no cost to you.
• DOL Wage and Hour Division, Philadelphia District Office: The regional office with jurisdiction over the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, where this case originated. This office now has a precedential ruling to enforce from.
• State labor enforcement agencies (PA, NJ, DE): State wage laws often provide additional protections beyond federal FLSA minimums. Filing a state-level complaint can run parallel to a federal one and may provide additional remedies.
• U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division: In cases of systemic wage theft affecting large numbers of workers, the DOJ can pursue broader enforcement actions. The breadth of Prestige’s violations across multiple compensation categories and years is exactly the profile that warrants federal attention beyond a single civil suit.

Grassroots and Direct Action

• If you are or were a home health aide at Prestige: Contact a workers’ rights legal clinic in your area. The National Employment Law Project (NELP) and Legal Aid organizations in Philadelphia offer free wage theft consultations. You do not need money to fight this.
• If you work in home healthcare anywhere in the Third Circuit: This ruling means your travel time between clients is legally compensable work time. If your employer is not paying for it, that is wage theft. Document your travel routes and times. Keep your own records because, as this case proved, your employer may not keep them for you.
• Share this ruling with co-workers: Wage theft thrives on workers not knowing their rights. The specific legal standard established here, that travel between clients during the workday is compensable regardless of whether an off-duty period occurred in between, is now settled law in the Third Circuit. Every home health aide in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware should know it.
• Support home health aide unionization efforts: The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and 1199SEIU specifically organize home health workers. Unionized home health aides have contractually enforced travel pay provisions, grievance procedures, and the collective power to fight violations without relying solely on understaffed government enforcement agencies.
• Mutual aid: Home health aides who have been victims of wage theft are often in immediate financial crisis while legal remedies work through the system. Local mutual aid networks, emergency rental assistance programs, and food security organizations provide the bridge that federal enforcement cannot. Find your local mutual aid network at mutualaidhub.org.