August 19-25, 2004

city beat

Wage Rage

A city-owned nursing home owes $123,000 in back wages to poor residents who provided cheap labor.

by Brian Hickey

THE CHECK IS IN THE MAIL: Walter Williams is among the 20 Riverview personal-care home residents awaiting their payday. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Walter Williams isn't ashamed to admit he needed money badly. Quite frankly, the 64-year-old North Philadelphia native would have pretty much taken any legal means to get his hands on some.

In October 2001, he was living at the Riverview Home for the Aged, a personal-care home of last resort nestled between the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility and the Delaware River in the Far Northeast. The city-operated Riverview is the kind of place people go when they have no family to care for them, no money for a private long-term care facility and an inability to entirely fend for themselves in the outside world either physically or mentally.

So, when a Riverview employee offered Williams the chance to earn some cash by making beds throughout the home, he jumped at the opportunity.

His rounds lasted three hours a day, five days a week. At the end of the month, residents lucky enough to pick up odd jobs, ranging from washing city-owned cars and landscaping to cleaning up after birds, rabbits, hamsters and other pets, would be summoned to the Riverview cafeteria. There, they'd wait in line until they reached the table where a secretary was waiting with a stack of brown envelopes. Inside those envelopes was cash.

In Williams' case, 60 hours of labor was valued at $25.

Riverview and city officials called the program "motivational therapy," a means through which they could get residents working and interacting with others in their insular community. It was never intended to give the residents paying, full-time jobs, say city officials who, facing scrutiny, now note that they weren't trying to skirt the law to cull some inexpensive labor.

But while that sounds noble, mental-health advocates say the program crossed the line of decency.

Having investigated the matter after fielding complaints from residents over the course of several months, the U.S. Department of Labor and the state Department of Public Welfare (DPW) found that Riverview violated both federal minimum-wage regulations and state statutes that declare personal-care home residents are to be fairly compensated for any work beyond their own housekeeping. Spokespersons for both agencies say they're in the process of taking action against the facility, which is already on probation with DPW.

Barbara Grant, a spokeswoman for Mayor John Street, said Tuesday that the city recently agreed to pay 20 residents roughly $123,000 in back wages during the next two years. Residents, she says, will receive one payment this year and one next year.

"Our intent was to have residents do some work for motivational and therapeutic reasons," Grant says of the matter that was resolved before it went to civil court. "When we found that was a violation, we settled."

Still, advocates maintain that Riverview officials were doing nothing short of preying on some of the weakest members of society.

"I knew what was going on was wrong," says Williams, who has since moved out of Riverview and into a Center City assisted-living high-rise, "but even $25 makes a difference when you're in the position I was in."

Williams says he's been told to expect two checks for a total of $1,400 to reimburse him for back wages.

Department of Labor spokeswoman Leni Uddyback-Fortson couldn't comment on whether the settlement will cover minimum-wage violations. (Businesses who don't pay nonexempt employees at least $5.15 an hour face fines ranging from $100 to $500 for each day they fail to comply.)

DPW spokeswoman Stacey Ward could say only that licensing violations have been found but that their investigators can't levy a final ruling until Labor's probe is complete.

Still, the licensing violations come at an inopportune time for Riverview, which had its state licensing status downgraded to "provisional" after a DPW investigation that ended late last year. Among the problems discovered were residents not being "treated with dignity and respect" and that staff weren't providing "for the care and safety of residents without abuse," according to DPW records.

At that time, officials were given until Aug. 26 to remedy the situation and from there, DPW will conduct a full re-inspection.

Riverview officials also faced the uncertainty of whether the city would be closing the facility, as Mayor Street said he planned to do during the 2003 budget process. That phasing-out initiative was quickly halted when city officials realized residents would otherwise be forced into homelessness. Instead, they're dropping the occupancy rate from around 250 to 210 through attrition.

Robert V. Hess, the city's deputy managing director for special needs housing, knows being in the business of providing temporary personal care is a double-edged sword. While it's necessary to help those in need, it's not the type of institution that a city is best suited to run. Even so, he maintains that the quality of life for Riverview residents is much better than what he's seen at privately run personal-care homes.

When contacted earlier this week about the violations, Hess wasn't able to talk specifics but noted that "there was a therapy program and there was a difference of opinion about it, which is unfortunate because some of the residents were benefiting."

Eleanor Daly doesn't want to hear about how Riverview residents were healing through grunt work, however. As director for advocacy services for the nonprofit Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania, she says the whole thing disgusts her.

"In no way can they frame this as "motivational therapy,'" Daly says. "These are individuals who are in these homes in the first place because they're among the most vulnerable folks in the city. They have nowhere else to go. [Riverview was] taking advantage of these people."

Pam Walz, director of the elderly law project at Community Legal Services, a law firm that serves low-income Philadelphians, questions how the state didn't shut the program down from the get-go. It's since been halted, but Goodwill has set up a shop in the facility where resident workers are paid minimum wage, city officials say.

"DPW presumably either knew or could have found out about this incentive program long ago," she says. "I have to question why they waited for the Department of Labor to step in before they did anything about it."

By Williams' account, employees would reach out to residents when there was a job that the staff didn't want to do themselves. When he started complaining that he wanted a position that would pay more than $25 a month, he was transferred to the parking lot, where he could wash Riverview's vans at $5 a pop. He says that many of his co-workers were residents who didn't even receive Social Security or disability payments. Because Riverview uses those payments to offset the cost of housing a resident, Williams says that payments to those people were garnished before they went to the cafeteria on payday.

Grant says that the settlement won't alter the State Road facility's commitment to helping residents, both from motivational and therapeutic standpoints. For his part, even Williams admits the program wasn't all that bad.

"I'll tell you this: $25 was nothing!" he says. "But [getting] that money kept me from going and begging for it."