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The U.S. Department of Labor has filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against the CEO of a national staffing and consulting firm for “severely underpaying and callously mistreating” a woman who had come from India to work for her.
The department filed the complaint against Himanshu Bhatia, CEO for Rose International and IT Staffing and Consulting company, Aug. 22 alleging that Sheela Ningwal, was unfairly compensated for her work as a live-in domestic service worker when she was Bhatia’s employee at her San Juan Capistrano home.
The complaint alleged that Bhatia paid her domestic service worker $400 a month plus food and housing for work being performed during 15 ½ hours a day, seven days a week at her home in San Juan Capistrano and other luxury residences in Miami, Las Vegas and Long Beach, California.
The domestic service worker also was subject to “callous abuse and retaliation”, including being forced to sleep in the garage on a piece of carpet alongside Bhatia’s dogs who slept on a mattress, when she was ill, and being left without food when Bhatia would leave her residence for days.
Additionally, Bhatia confiscated her domestic service worker’s passport, restricting her free movement and only made available to the domestic service worker when she had to travel to perform domestic service duties at Bhatia’s penthouse in Miami.
According to the complaint Bhatia terminated the worker in December 2014 after catching her researching “labor laws” online and after the domestic service worker refused to sign a document Bhatia authored that stated that she was being paid an adequate salary and had no employment dispute with Bhatia.
The department’s Wage and Hour Division found that Bhatia violated the Fair Labor Standards Act’s minimum wage and record-keeping provisions from July 2012 to December 2014 as well as the act’s anti-retaliation provision. Rose International had more than $357 million in revenue in 2011.
The department seeks an order that Bhatia is liable for liquidated damages, compensatory damages, back wages, punitive damages, all legal fees and any other relief as the court deems fit, according to a report in Northern California Record.
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