On a January morning in 2019, after she got off her 24-hour shift as an in-home care assistant for an elderly woman in Pomfret, Jeannie Ayer got a call from owner of the agency she worked for. Her boss asked to meet at the Dunkin’ Donuts across the road from the VA Medical Center in White River Junction.

When Ayer arrived at the doughnut shop, Rosalind Godfrey, owner of West Lebanon in-home care provider Your Comfort Zone, was sitting at a table by the window. Godfrey signaled to Ayer to keep her voice down by putting a finger to her lips in a “shush” gesture, Ayer said recounting the meeting.

Ayer sat at the table and Godfrey asked if she could treat Ayer to a coffee then went to the counter to get it. But Godfrey hadn’t called Ayer for a coffee klatch.

Over the preceding weeks, Ayer said, Godfrey had been repeatedly asking if she had received a check from the U.S. Department of Labor. Godfrey had been insisting — in a knotted explanation that Ayer could not follow — that the money technically should be handed over to her.

“I knew what she wanted,” Ayer recounted in an interview with the Valley News. “She kept saying, ‘I can’t tell you to give it to me. But everyone else is. It’s my money.’ ”

Without being asked, Ayer took out a white envelope with $217 stuffed inside and placed it in the middle of the table. Godfrey swept the envelope the rest of the way toward her and tucked it into her purse, Ayer recalled.

Ayer said she knew at the time that Godfrey was not entitled to the money, the proceeds from a check she had cashed the day before at a bank near her home in St. Johnsbury, Vt.

The check was for overtime wages due to Ayer that the Department of Labor had ordered Your Comfort Zone to pay after investigating the agency over complaints the business wasn’t compensating employees properly.

But after weeks of Godfrey beseeching her — sometimes with her in tears — to hand the money over, arguing that the money rightfully belonged to her, Ayer couldn’t put up with the pleas any longer.

Besides, Ayer said, she had more pressing matters on her mind.

“My husband was sick. I needed my job. I was new. I didn’t want to rock the boat,” Ayer told the Valley News.

Other cases detailed

Ayer, 69, was not the only employee of Your Comfort Zone not to be paid for overtime hours they worked, according to a civil lawsuit the U.S. Department of Labor has brought against the business and Godfrey in federal court.

The West Lebanon business, which Godfrey incorporated in 2006, employs assistants “to provide dignity and quality of life for seniors and individuals with disabilities who wish to live at home,” Your Comfort Zone’s website says. An in-home care worker, who can be at a client’s home around-the-clock for days on end, helps out with a variety of everyday tasks, including meal preparation, dressing, bathing, medication reminders and transportation.

In October, the Labor Department sued Your Comfort Zone and Godfrey over pressuring employees to “kick back” wages recovered for them by the Department of Labor and falsifying employee time sheets submitted to federal investigators probing the company’s pay practices.

The U.S. District Court subsequently entered consent preliminary injunction to prevent Your Comfort Zone and Godfrey from engaging in the conduct alleged in the government’s lawsuit and ordered Godfrey to stop interfering with the government’s current investigation of the company.

The injunction was the third time the Labor Department’s wage and hour division took action against Your Comfort Zone, which two prior investigations found failed to pay a total of $100,055 in overtime wages to 25 employees.

The Valley News made multiple attempts to contact Godfrey and an attorney for comment on the Labor Department’s investigation and lawsuit, but neither responded to emails and phone calls.

During the Labor Department’s first investigation of Your Comfort Zone, covering the period from 2016 to 2018, it found that the business owed employees a total of $70,253 in overtime wages, according to the government’s complaint.

A second investigation covering seven months in 2018 found that Your Comfort Zone owed employees $29,802 in overtime wages, the complaint said.

Godfrey then pressured some of those employees to “kick back” to her their overtime wages, which she had been ordered to pay by the Labor Department, the complaint shows.

For example, not long after the first investigation in 2018, Godfrey “took actions to convince employees to return back wages they were owed,” the lawsuit said.

And despite signing agreements to comply with labor law going forward, Godfrey nonetheless made attempts to claw back the wages paid to employees and in some cases succeeded, the government’s lawsuit details.

“Godfrey told multiple employees that other workers were returning the back wages,” the lawsuit said, telling them that “it would be like stealing to keep the check for back wages.”

Regulations in regard to paying home care workers are complicated and depend upon whether the worker is employed directly by the client or a third-party agency.

Initially exempted from many of the standard pay protections under the 1974 Fair Labor Standards Act, the U.S. Department of Labor revised rules in 2013 to apply minimum wage and overtime pay protections to the category of “companions,” which was subsequently upheld in court decisions.

“In terms of the simple question: Is a third-party employed live-in person who does the services of a home care subject to overtime protection? The answer’s yes,” said Bill Dombi, president of the National Association for Home Care & Hospice in Washington, D.C., noting that he lacked sufficient information to comment on the government’s case against Your Comfort Zone and Godfrey.

Moreover, when it comes to state versus federal regulations, “the one that protects the worker the most trumps,” Dombi said.

The Department of Labor’s complaint details the case of Datlene Bowen, whom Godrey told “that if Bowen did not want the check, Bowen could return the check to Godfrey,” which Bowen did, according to the lawsuit.

Bowen, who worked for Your Comfort Zone from 2016 to 2019, said in an interview with the Valley News that she gave back a check she received of more than $10,000 in owed overtime to Godfrey in 2018.

The hours are long and unrelenting as an in-home care provider, Bowen explained.

She would arrive at a client’s home on Sunday night and would stay with them around-the-clock until Thursday night or Friday morning. Following a 12-hour break, Bowen would be off to another client’s home and then shoehorn in another shift between Friday night and Sunday before repeating the cycle again.

Bowen, 46, a Jamaican immigrant who lives in Lebanon and now works as a private in-home caregiver, said when she received notice from the U.S. Department of Labor of “payment of back wages” covering a 15-month period in the amount of $10,631.57, she asked Godfrey what the money was for.

Godfrey replied “she didn’t know” and “if you don’t want it you can give it back to me,” Bowen said.

“When I saw (the check) I didn’t know what it was for. Because that’s why I asked. I was being paid by the week so I didn’t want to take it. And then in the long run I thought I’m going to have to pay it back. So I gave it to her. She said she don’t know (why I received the check) and I just take her word for it,” Bowen told the Valley News.

Then, following the Department of Labor’s second investigation of Your Comfort Zone in 2018, Bowen said she received another check in back overtime pay in the amount of $4,000. But this time Bowen said she called the Labor Department and called the contact listed in the paperwork.

“I asked him, ‘I’m being paid every two weeks and I’m getting this check. What is it for?’ ” Bowen related. “He said it was for overtime pay and he was so happy I got it. It’s at this point I realize the check is mine.”

After she got off the phone with the Department of Labor, Bowen called Godfrey and said was going to keep the second check.

“ ‘OK,’ she said, and hung up the phone,” Bowen said.

‘You’re never really sleeping’

Your Comfort Zone and Godfrey further interfered with the Labor Department’s investigation into their pay practices by asking employees about their contact with investigators, telling at least one employee they did not need to speak with investigators and submitting at least one time sheet to investigators with false information, the Labor Department said.

Steve McKinney, wage and hour district division director with the Department of Labor in Manchester, said it is unusual for investigators to seek a preliminary injunction but reports of employees that Godfrey interfered with the investigation were concerning enough that protection needed to be sought for the whistleblowers.

“Workers need to feel safe speaking with us so we can get the full story,” McKinney told the Valley News, who said the investigation “is still in the early stage.”

In-home caregivers being paid unfairly by their employer is a familiar story for Debra Adams, who has worked for 44 years as a caregiver for elderly people unable to live on their own and has had to go to the state labor board to receive wages she was owed for unpaid hours.

Rarely are in-home care workers able to get a peaceful night of rest, said Adams, who has not been employed by Your Comfort Zone and did not comment on the company in particular, but instead talked about the industry in general.

“Even when you’re sleeping you’re on alert. We have baby monitors next to us so you can hear the person getting up if they need help to the bathroom. You’re never really sleeping,” she said.

Adams said some employers will use a “flat rate” like $100 for the sleeping period, even though they are supposed to pay an hourly rate. But in-home caregivers are seldom in a position to stick up for their rights.

“A lot of people accept the way it is because if they don’t they won’t have a job,” Adams said.

The Labor Department complaint details how Your Comfort Zone “altered” one employee’s time sheet.

In September 2021, Godfrey submitted to a Labor Department investigator a time sheet purporting to show the hours worked by caregiver Cheyenne Wrigley during a preceding August pay period.

But “neither the writing in the column reflecting Wrigley’s work start and end times nor the signature of the time sheet matches Wrigley’s handwriting. The hours included on the purported time sheet did not align with Wrigley’s actual hours worked during the pay period or the time sheet that Wrigley had filled out and submitted to Godfrey,” the complaint said.

And then when Wrigley cooperated with investigators, Godfrey “took actions to intimidate” Wrigley by “following” her to another work site after she had served notice her her resignation to Godfrey. according to the lawsuit. When Wrigley saw Godfrey outside the work site, she phoned a supervisor to ask for assistance from a colleague.

Godfrey then texted Wrigley messages that said, “I’m saddened that you decided to turn on me. And sorry you left, You know your pay & I would have made things right if I did something wrong … sorry you decided to depart but please, don’t make things up all of a sudden ... please don’t go say nasty things about me.”

A call to complain

Vicki Favreau believes she is responsible for launching the Labor Department’s latest investigation into Your Comfort Zone after she contacted state officials to complain about what she said were unpaid wages for overtime.

Favreau grew concerned over the way Godfrey wanted her to submit time sheets, she told the Valley News.

Favreau, 62, said that in her paycheck every two weeks would be included two time sheets for the next biweekly pay period: one that she was to fill out with the hours she worked, and another time sheet that she was to leave blank and sign before sending to Your Comfort Zone along with the completed time sheet.

Most of Favreau’s clients resided in Vermont, she said.

“When I started working there (Godrey) told me that we didn’t get paid overtime because the state of Vermont didn’t pay us to sleep,” Favreau said in an interview with the Valley News.

Favreau said she would submit a time sheet recording anywhere from 120 hours to 180 hours for each two-week pay period.

“I was working constantly,” she said.

Often at night when she was sleeping she would have to wake up and help the client go to the bathroom or adjust her pillow and bed to help her sleep more comfortably,

When Favreau asked Godfrey why she had to submit two time sheets, one of them blank, Godfrey explained that even though she was not required to pay employees while they slept she nonetheless believed it was “fair” to pay them for all the hours her employees resided in-home with the client, which she paid at the “straight” rate.

But when Favreau checked her pay stubs, she found all the hours she worked were accounted for but the rate at which she was paid would frequently vary from the $13.50 per hour rate at which she was hired.

“Sometimes it was $12, sometimes it was $10.60,” Favreau said. “It was just all different.”

Suspicious that something was not right about signing a blank time sheet, Favreau said, she reached out to the New Hampshire Department of Labor last summer, which in turn forwarded her information to the U.S. Department of Labor.

An investigator from the U.S. Department of Labor then contacted Favreau, Favreau said.

The investigator asked her “if we had to get up at night for the clients and I was, like, ‘yes,’ and they said because we were ‘on call,’ even when we were sleeping, they had to pay us overtime,” Favreau said.

Favreau was not covered under the prior Department of Labor investigations of Your Comfort Zone because her employment with the agency began after the second investigation was completed.

Now managing a convenience store in St. Johnsbury, Favreau said she “hasn’t a clue” as to how much overtime pay she may due from Your Comfort Zone. But she plans to find out.

“I have all my pay stubs and time sheets. I’m going to sit down and figure it out,” she said.

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.

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