Staffing firm, nurse settle recruiting suit

A Sunrise staffing agency that recruits overseas health-care workers for U.S. employers has agreed to settle a lawsuit that included claims it threatened a Filipina nurse with “immigration fraud” charges while seeking more than $150,000 from her for breaching her employment services contract.

Management Health Systems, which operates as MedPro Healthcare Staffing, and Eden Selispara announced the settlement in separate statements released Thursday by Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group that represented Selispara in the breach of contract suit filed by MedPro in Broward County Circuit Court. Selispara filed a countersuit against the company.

More than 5,000 foreign-educated nurses are brought to the United States under special visa programs each year from the Philippines, India and other Asian countries by dozens of staffing agencies, according to Public Citizen. U.S. health-care facilities pay the employment firms during the workers’ short-term placements, and the employment firms pay the workers.

Selispara agreed to become one of those workers. In July 2013, she signed an employment contract that called for her to work wherever MedPro sent her for three years, according to the nurse’s suit against MedPro. The contract stipulated that, in exchange for securing her visa and licenses and transporting her to the United States, she would owe MedPro $33,320. That debt would be reduced by a third at the end of each of the three contract years, the contract said.

The bureaucracy necessary to secure a special visa for Selispara to work and live in the United States wasn’t complete until September 2016, when she underwent a routine interview at the U.S. embassy in the Philippines. But days before that interview, MedPro presented the nurse with another employment agreement and said she needed to sign it right away, Selispara said in her lawsuit. The new one stated her hourly wage would be $26 — $1 more than the 2013 agreement promised. But the new contract no longer said Selispara would owe $33,320. Instead, it said she would owe the “employer’s actual damages” — an unspecified amount which would be “determined by a United States District Court Certified Mediator.”

What the contract did not say, according to her suit, was when Selispara would begin earning that $26 an hour, after her arrival in the United States on Jan. 7, 2017.

By early March, a fed-up Selispara told MedPro that she was heading to Houston to look for a job on her own and left South Florida.

MedPro sued Selispara in Broward County Circuit Court, saying she violated her employment services contract by failing to report for the first day of a contract term that would have begun on March 7, 2017, and ended March 7, 2020. The company’s suit sought reimbursement for three years of unearned revenue it expected to collect for Selispara’s work, plus money spent on her travel, visa screening, English examinations, professional examinations, credentialing, state licensing, housing, attorneys’ fees and interest.

Selispara filed a countersuit contending there was no first day of work to report for, because MedPro failed to find her a job. She said that while being housed in a three-bedroom apartment in Sunrise with eight other workers for two months after her arrival in the United States, she was not placed in a job or invited to an interview. Meanwhile, MedPro forbade her from traveling farther than Miami or working for any other employer in any capacity, she said.

During her two months without work, Selispara said, MedPro paid her a promised orientation stipend of $2,500 despite MedPro’s statement on a U.S. government immigration form that she would be paid the “prevailing wage” of $26 an hour upon her arrival to the United States.

Selispara said she approached MedPro representatives in March 2017 and complained about the “untenability of indefinite unemployment without pay and confinement in South Florida.”

MedPro representatives “responded by threatening to make a baseless report of fraud to U.S. immigration officials” and presented her with a demand for more than

$150,000 “to be paid within three days,” largely based on revenue the company had planned to generate from her employment, the suit states.

In its response, MedPro denied both claims.

Acting on a tip from colleagues, Selispara accepted a job at a hospital in Houston after leaving Sunrise and still works there now, Public Citizen attorney Adam Pulver said.

The two news releases, which are posted on Public Citizens’ website Citizen.org along with terms of the settlement, said the parties agreed on Thursday to settle the matter, with neither party admitting to any wrongdoing.

Terms of the settlement call for MedPro to pay its recruits whatever wage it stipulates on immigration documents as soon as the recruits enter the United States, including during the orientation and pre-placement phases, Pulver said.

The company also agreed to limit to $40,000 the amount of money it will seek from recruits for breaching employment contracts. In past lawsuits, the company has sought to recover as much as $300,000, Pulver said. Caserta disputed that number, saying “MedPro has never demanded anywhere near that amount from a healthcare professional. That number should be closer to $150,000.”

MedPro also agreed to take steps to ensure that recruits understand rights, responsibilities and contract terms throughout the recruitment process.

In an email on Thursday, MedPro corporate counsel Cristy Caserta said: “Our placed healthcare professionals’ journey and experience is a positive one that provides comprehensive preparation, including professional licensing, U.S. credentialing, assimilation training and all necessary immigration authorization processes, allowing these professionals the opportunity to work in their chosen field in the U.S., securing permanent residency.”

Pulver said MedPro agreed to settle after her attorneys pointed out how the 2016 employment contract replaced $33,320 — which the 2013 contract said she would owe for breaching the three-year pact — with an unspecified sum of damages to be determined by a mediator.

Most overseas nurses like Selispara feel they have no choice but to sign anything they are given, Pulver said, leaving them vulnerable to litigation and wage garnishment by recruitment firms.

“The settlement accomplished important changes that hopefully will prevent people from being in the same situation with MedPro or similar companies,” he said, adding that many companies that operate under similar business models sue when their recruits breach their contracts.

MedPro’s Caserta said the existence of the second agreement “was not a factor in our decision to settle the case.”

Rather, MedPro asked Selispara to sign a second contract because it increased the “prevailing wage” she would be paid from $25 to $26. “To secure her green card to work for MedPro, Ms. Selispara had to show embassy officials that she would be paid the correct prevailing wage by MedPro once in the U.S.,” she said.

Caserta said in an email Friday that nurse recruits are paid the promised prevailing wage as soon as they arrive in the United States, despite Selispara’s claims to the contrary.

“Despite the fact that we felt we had a strong legal case under which we would prevail, we recognized that this was not a good experience for Ms. Selispara and we agreed to end the case and focus our attention on how we can do better to improve the experience for our foreign educated professionals,” Caserta said.

Asked why Selispara wasn’t placed in a job, Caserta said, “there was a short-term drop in available assignments specific to her clinical speciality.”

A search of the Broward County Circuit Court’s online database shows 71 suits by Management Health Systems against individual named defendants. Of those, 41 remain open.

Caserta said the settlement terms “should not affect any other pending cases.”