The United States Department of Labor is seeking workers who were not paid overtime and/or misclassified as independent contractors by a staffing agency and cleaning contractor in Hawaii. The consent judgement stated that the defendants violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by “misclassifying housekeeping and janitorial employees as independent contractors; failing to pay their hours for hours worked in a workweek in excess of 40 hours at a rate not less than one and one-half times the regular rates at which they were employed; altering or manipulating employee time and attendance or payroll 20 records to reduce the number of hours actually worked by an employee and/or deducting time for which payment was owed as unpaid time.”
The United States Department of Labor said:
HONOLULU – The U.S. Department of Labor is actively seeking hundreds of workers who are owed their share of more than $3.8 million in unpaid overtime withheld deliberately by a Kilauea staffing agency and Lihue cleaning contractor after a federal investigation and litigation that followed.
The department’s Wage and Hour Division found that Alacrity Employment Services in Kilauea and Hawaii Care and Cleaning Inc. in Lihuedeprived 1,133 employees of their rightful overtime wages between March 5, 2021, and Nov. 13, 2024. Investigators also determined the employers frequently falsified pay records to mask their violations.
“Overtime worked should be overtime paid,” said Wage and Hour Division Acting District Director Min Kirk in Honolulu. “An employer cannot evade their responsibility for overtime pay by using schemes such as excluding workers from payroll or underreporting their actual work hours.”
On Jan. 14, 2025, the department’s Office of the Solicitor obtained a consent judgment in the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii requiring Hawaii Care and Cleaning, Alacrity Employment Services, and their respective owners, William Allen and Amy Galtes, to pay $1.9 million in back wages and an equal amount in damages to the affected workers. The judgment also directs Hawaii Care and Cleaning and Alacrity Employment Services to pay $50,000 in civil money penalties given their willful violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
