Posted on April 29th, 2021
Find below a complete transcript of this video.
What’s up fellow entrepreneurs its John Fagerholm again, and today, I want to talk about living employees and why you should never do it. But first, remember as always I’m a lawyer, but I’m not, not your lawyer.
So please seek competent legal representation for your specific problem or legal question.
In my opinion, living employees are too risky in California and, and it just shouldn’t be done at all. So I understand that it is convenient for some businesses to have living employees, but more often than not. When one of my clients has come to me with a problem related to a living employee, that convenience and benefit was more for the employee.
So there are two major problems with living employees. The first is the labor law liability that’s created when employees claim that they were on duty for the time that they were not actually working.
The second is the difficulty in removing a former employer from the home or facility, if they’re terminated quick. So with the first problem living employees that bring claims tend to claim that even though they didn’t work 24 hours, they were on duty 24 hours and we’re not free to leave.
So this type of claim is prevalent in the retirement home or group home businesses. And there are several firms that specialize just in these types of claims because the practice is so common in these businesses and the liability is there typically.
The law requires that a person be paid for all of their hours work and that they are considered at work. If they’re not free to leave, whether or not they are actually doing work. So if a living employee claims that they were required to be on duty and the employer will have to prove that they were not on duty and free to leave for those additional hours beyond their scheduled work hours.
So if that can’t be proven, which is it’s hard to do, you know, in that setting, the liability can be enormous because the law requires time and a half for hours worked after eight hours and double time for hours work after 12 hours.
It’s very hard to prove that the employee was not on duty when they live at the facility or home. And even if it can’t be proven, the cost of defending these claims are costly and not worth the, you know, the convenience of having themselves as livers. So the second issue, isn’t this isn’t as costly as the first, but it’s way more annoying and uncomfortable.
When you terminate a live in employee, you can also be creating a landlord tenant issue if that employee refuses to leave. So since the home or facility is technically the employees, residents, they can require you to evict them instead of just leaving voluntarily.
So, and everyone knows how difficult it is to evict anyone in California and now with COVID and the COVID protocols related to paying rent and all that stuff. It’s it just, it’s, it’s almost impossible to evict anybody you know right now.
So it, it just isn’t worth doing. So my advice is don’t have living employees.
Its just the risk is too high. So that’s it for this video.
And until next time be productive.
