November 5, 2025
Sixteen home care workers have achieved an important legal victory that shines a light on the widespread practice of wage theft in the home care industry. Represented by the Public Justice Center and AARP Foundation, the workers sued FinePoints Private Duty HealthCare in 2023 for unlawfully docking their pay and failing to pay them overtime and for travel time between clients’ homes. On August 7, 2025, the court granted a default judgment in favor of the workers for these unpaid wages, liquidated damages, attorneys’ fees, and other costs.
According to the suit, plaintiffs Margaret Bobb, Delisia Bracey, and other FinePoints home care employees traveled to multiple client homes per day, helping older adults and people with disabilities with bathing and dressing, preparing meals, cleaning, monitoring medications, providing transportation to appointments, and other caregiving tasks. The suit alleged that many of FinePoints’ home care aides consistently worked substantial overtime hours and spent time traveling between clients’ homes, often seven days per week, without the company fully compensating them for their work. FinePoints’ misclassification of its home care employees as independent contractors also exposed them to the loss of other employee rights such as sick leave, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation coverage.
This final judgment sends a strong message that home care agencies must pay workers for their labor. Lead plaintiff Margaret Bobb said in an article from AARP Foundation, “I’m so pleased that the court listened to us caregivers and saw the injustice. We always deserved to be paid fairly for our work.” As the case proceeds to collect over $500,000 in payments from the employer, the PJC and AARP Foundation will continue fighting to get the unpaid wages into workers’ pockets.
The FinePoints case is part of the PJC’s broader advocacy to combat wage theft in the home care industry, and in particular, the practice of misclassifying employees as independent contractors. Together with allies, we successfully advocated to pass the Home Care Worker Rights Act (HB 39 / SB 197) in 2024. Set to go into effect in January 2026, the law will require that home care agencies must correctly classify their home care workers as employees – rather than misclassify them as independent contractors – in order to receive reimbursement from certain Medicaid programs in Maryland. Independent contractor misclassification denies workers full pay and basic labor protections and excludes them from the social safety net. This law will prevent the problem before it occurs for approximately 20,000 home care workers. It will extend rights and protections to these low-wage workers who are predominantly Black women and older adults, including workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, sick and safe leave, full pay for all hours worked, and reduced tax burdens. In addition, the law helps lay the groundwork to improve all Medicaid-funded home care workers’ wages by ensuring that all such home care agencies have comparable expenses and compete on the same level playing field.
With every wage theft case and every new law, we make progress in reforming the home care industry’s payment practices. In the coming year, we’ll continue representing workers to recover unpaid wages and monitor the State’s implementation of the Home Care Worker Rights Act so that employers classify home care workers correctly and provide full pay and benefits.
Thank you to the many people who worked on this case, including PJC attorneys Sam Williamson and Ejaz Baluch, Jr.; former PJC attorneys David Rodwin and Lucy Zhou; AARP Foundation attorneys Rebecca Rodgers, Louis Lopez, Mary William, and William Alvarado Rivera; and former AARP Foundation attorney Benjamin L. Davis, III.
