In the age of the gig economy, healthcare workers use many different mobile-phone apps to find work and get paid. Paulette Hewitt, a nursing assistant, booked shifts at different healthcare facilities in Los Angeles through an app called Clipboard Health.
One day, as Hewitt worked shifts during the COVID-19 pandemic, her paychecks from the app stopped coming in, she said. Hewitt said she was owed more than $21,000, including for regular and overtime shifts, for work she performed from November 2021 to January 2022.
Unable to get paid for those shifts despite asking Clipboard Health’s support staff for help, she filed a wage claim with the California Labor Commissioner last summer. In early March, Hewitt met with a representative from the labor commissioner’s office and a Clipboard Health representative, state records show.
The estimated penalties for the overdue unpaid wages were more than $18,000, and liquidated damages for failure to pay minimum wages for the period in question were nearly $8,000, bringing the amount Clipboard Health potentially owed to more than $47,000, according to those records.
Hewitt said her job was her only source of income. She eventually fell behind on paying her bills. She lost her family’s home and had to stay with friends for a while, so she sent her teenage son and daughter to live with their dad in New York.
Worried that the money she was owed would be further delayed — even though she was promised payment during that meeting, she said — she contacted MarketWatch in late March.
“I lost my house, my car, my kids,” she said at the time.
Over the next few months, MarketWatch asked questions of Clipboard Health and Kei-Ai Los Angeles Healthcare Center, the facility where Hewitt worked the shifts for which she said she wasn’t paid. In May, Hewitt said Clipboard Health offered her a $36,000 settlement — an amount she said she told the company she was willing to accept — that included the condition that she stop talking with the media.
But before she signed the settlement, what MarketWatch learned about Hewitt’s case offered a glimpse into how workers who may not be considered employees and rely on third parties such as Clipboard Health for their shifts can sometimes see their wages delayed or go unpaid — a complaint also reflected in wage claims filed against the company by other workers in California; interviews with other users of the app elsewhere in the country; and a $2.2 million settlement of a lawsuit against the company in California last year over claims including unpaid overtime, in which the company denies any wrongdoing.
“It took them a year to get to me,” Hewitt said before she stopped contact with MarketWatch under her agreement with the company. “That is so wrong on so many levels.”
Apps can streamline shift work, but also create confusion over responsibility
If Hewitt were a staff nurse, she might have had a direct supervisor or human-resources department to approach about her unpaid wages, and maybe even to advocate on her behalf.
But like gig workers in other industries who are considered independent contractors, she was on her own. She had to contact the app’s support staff to try to take care of the problem — and she said they were overseas and weren’t much help. She said she could not reach anyone from Clipboard Health directly, and when she turned to the facility where she worked the shifts, a manager there said it had already paid Clipboard Health for her shifts and didn’t know why she had not been paid yet.
Clipboard Health did not respond to a request for comment on this specific allegation.
Although apps like Clipboard Health can streamline shift work, the added layer between healthcare facilities and workers can allow for evasion of or confusion over responsibility when issues come up, such as in cases like Hewitt’s.
Kei-Ai, a facility run by Aspen Skilled Healthcare, and Aspen management did not respond to repeated requests for comment about what part they might have played in the delay in paying Hewitt.
MarketWatch spoke with Cameron Espino, Kei-Ai’s director of staff development, when Hewitt went to the facility and handed him the phone. During that conversation, he asked for Hewitt’s timesheets. MarketWatch forwarded him dozens of timesheets that Hewitt had shared, and Espino responded to that email saying he had forwarded the timesheets to payroll.
Jimmy Asci, a spokesperson for Clipboard Health, said “tens of thousands of professionals successfully [use] the Clipboard marketplace on a regular basis.” The app, made by San Francisco-based Clipboard Health, a private venture-backed company, has been downloaded more than 19,000 times in the past 30 days, according to Apptopia, which provides data on mobile-app downloads.
About Hewitt’s case, Asci said many of the shifts in question were not booked using the app, so Clipboard Health was unable to verify them. Hewitt told MarketWatch in April that the facility would initiate contact and call her into work, and that she would then tell Clipboard Health about the shifts. She said this had happened many times before, and that she previously had no problem getting paid on time. Other Clipboard Health users have reported similar experiences of facilities bypassing the app to call them in to work.
In response, the company said through Asci: “Our app-based marketplace cannot function properly when users book shifts outside of the app. We are now more committed than ever to reiterating with our users that the marketplace does not permit booking shifts outside of the app, and Clipboard will not support payment for such shifts.”
Asci would not comment on the confidential settlement Hewitt said she reached with Clipboard Health.
The separate $2.2 million settlement in Kern County Superior Court in the class-action lawsuit against Twomagnets Inc., the company doing business as Clipboard Health, centered on accusations that the company misclassified healthcare workers as independent contractors instead of employees. Asci said Clipboard Health stands behind its business model, which “allows for flexibility, both for professionals and facilities.”
MarketWatch also obtained records for nearly 20 wage claims filed by Clipboard Health app users with the California Labor Commissioner since 2020. They show that other healthcare workers from around the state complained of experiences similar to those of Hewitt. The workers alleged unpaid or delayed wages and overtime pay, and complained about a lack of adequate support staff to whom they could talk about their issues. In some cases, the nursing assistants and licensed vocational nurses said they were not given extra pay that had been promised to them when they took care of COVID-19 patients.
The statuses of the claims vary. Some have been closed or settled, while others are under investigation by the state.
Clipboard Health has “been working hard to remedy … situations where our processes took longer than expected,” Asci said. The company has released two product updates in the past year to address the issue, he said: InstantPay and auto-verification, “both of which speed up payments to healthcare professionals after they complete shifts.” In addition, he said, the company is “continuing to invest in improving our support team and procedures to help provide more immediate, comprehensive support to healthcare professionals and facilities.”
A growing trend of companies offloading risk
Clipboard Health users in other parts of the country told MarketWatch that they, too, have run into issues getting paid.
Winsome Bishop, a nurse in Connecticut, said in an interview that her account was deactivated — meaning she can no longer use the Clipboard Health app to book shifts — after she complained to the company about not being paid for a shift that was canceled by a facility.
She said she was called in for an emergency shift through the app and headed to a facility in Wallingford, Conn. When she arrived, she was told the shift was canceled. Nurses are still supposed to be paid when shifts are unexpectedly canceled, according to Clipboard Health’s own terms, so she called Clipboard Health.
Bishop said she was told the shift was not canceled, and that it couldn’t be verified. She said she was owed more than $530.
“They did eventually pay after I threatened to go to the Department of Labor,” she said.
Clipboard Health would not comment on Bishop’s allegations.
Bishop said she is still using other similar services because she does not want to be a staff nurse. She thinks staff nurses are underpaid and have to put up with conditions like high patient-to-nurse ratios, while non-staff nurses like her can choose not to work at certain facilities if they don’t want to.
An unusually heavy workload can lead to fatigue and possibly mistakes by nurses, which can pose a risk to patients, Bishop said. “Especially if it’s your first time at a facility and you don’t know the residents, you have to say it’s not safe,” she said. “Something can go wrong.”
To Shelly Steward, the director of the Future of Work Initiative at the Aspen Institute, the complaints against Clipboard Health sound similar to issues that have popped up with other third parties like it. She said she is seeing a growing trend of companies offloading risk and responsibility to workers across industries, in different employment models and across income levels.
“When things go wrong with this model, it’s very difficult to address them,” Steward said in an interview. “Part of that is by design. There is not an HR department where you can call a direct line or knock on a door.”
Steward added that she expects the trend to continue: “There’s a lot of money to be made, and more risk to be shifted.”
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