Alaska Employment Law

U. S. District Judge Ralph Beistline has reconsidered and re-affirmed his earlier holding that Fairbanks group residential facilities for troubled adolescents are subject to the FLSA.   The FLSA covers residential facilities for “sick” and ”mentally ill” individuals, under 29 USC § 203(r). 

On its reconsideration motion, the facilities’ operator had disavowed the accuracy of the materials posted on its website, noting that “a company’s website is a marketing tool.  Often, marketing material is full of imprecise puffery that no one should take at face value.”    The operator contended that, contrary to those materials, some of the children currently housed at the various homes were not sick or mentally ill, and that their DSM-IV diagnoses reflected the improper ”medicalizing” of “common life challenges and adolescent behaviors.”  

Beistline said:

According to the reasoning offered by FCSA and John Regitano, despite the Mission Statement and the original stated purpose of the Therapeutic Family Homes, the FLSA should not be applied to house parents in light of the nature of the actual children residing in the homes. If the Court followed this reasoning to its logical conclusion, it could reach a different result for each set of house parents involved, because some of the homes may have had more “mentally ill” children than others.  Indeed, whether or not the FLSA applied, under this reasoning, could change regarding each individual home every time the residents of that home changed. The Court doubts that the FLSA was intended to be applied in such a manner.

In any event, the Court is not persuaded that the diagnoses listed by John Regitano do not qualify as “sick” or “mentally ill or defective” as required by the FLSA. The 26 children identified by Regitano suffer from a number of “disorders,” many of which are identified in the DSM-IV.  Defendants engage in an unsuccessful semantics argument by trying to state that the disorders do not fall under “sick” or “mentally ill or defective” under the FLSA.

The Court finds that Defendant, through its Therapeutic Family Homes, is clearly “engaged in the operation of . . . an institution primarily engaged in the care of the sick, . . . mentally ill or defective who reside on the premises of such institution.” 29 U.S.C. §203(r). Accordingly, Defendant is subject to the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Probert v. Family Centered Serv. of Alaska, No. 4:07-cv-0030-RRB (D.Alaska Order of Feb. 26, 2009).