Company Changing Us From Hourly Rates To “pay Per Point”. Paying Us Only What They Deem Productive.

Location: California, USA

Background:

• I have been working as a nurse at a Home Health Nursing agency for 4 years where I was hired at a full-time hourly rate
• I work 40 hours a week but I often only see a handful of patients throughout the week as our sales people have been not doing well to get us patients. Though I fill out the time by doing some sales calls on my own and providing education at facilities.
• This month they decided to change everyone (whether they were paid “per visit” or “hourly” or “salary” to a “Pay Per Point” model
• We still clock into our shift for a full days work but are only paid off of these “points”
• We are still considered full-time and still clock our hours and get benefits regardless of points

Pay Per Point Model

• Based on the training we received they are now paying all nurses based on “productivity points”
• These “Points” are based on what activity we are doing during the day and the type of visit we are sent on.
• These “Points” are seemingly in constant flux in the last few weeks and with no guarantee these points will be consistent going forward.
• There are two different points: One for “Visit” related points which is paid at a higher rate than normal. One for “Admin” related activities like meetings and training, paid at a lower rate. These two point types are paid very differently e.g. think $35 versus $65
• For example: 1 routine visit is 1 productivity point. It gets more complicated as each other visit type is based on what they think is appropriate. So a longer type visit might be 1.5 productivity points. Things like meetings and training are often 0.7 productivity points, falling below our current hourly rate and billed at the lower “Admin” productivity point.
• They gave us an example pay stub and it had a week where the person clocked in 30 hours of time but only had 1 visit and it showed paying them only 1 productivity point for that week. So their entire pay for one week was around $300. (Though with a biweekly pay system they still made over minimum wage for the two weeks as the next week had a lot of visits/points)
• We aren’t always paid for work like driving to a visit or if the person doesn’t show up

It seems ridiculous to have our pay so unpredictable. Pay that is based off sales people doing their job and pay that is based on the company assigned subjective numbers to everything we do which can change on a whim.

Questions

• Is this legal in California?
• What’s to stop them from just cutting what things are worth across the board to save money?
• What kind of recourse is available if this is not legal?