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Clocked in 12 hours a day, 7 days a week: How staffing bills for migrant shelters swelled with overtime
Chicago Tribune (
archive.ph)
By Joe Mahr, Nell Salzman, Alice Yin, and Dan Petrella
2023-10-20 17:16:00GMT
A child pushed in a stroller watches as contractors working at the Inn of Chicago migrant shelter unload supplies and transport them into the shelter on Oct. 3, 2023. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
When a security guard clocked out of a Streeterville migrant shelter one Friday in March, he’d just logged his 84th hour at work that week.
His bosses told the city it was at least his 56th day in a row working a 12-hour shift, according to invoices they filed with the city — invoices whose sizable overtime helped contribute to tens of millions in city payments to the firm staffing the city’s migrant shelters.
The security guard was employed by Favorite Healthcare Staffing, a national employment firm that has become the city’s biggest contractor to handle the growing migrant crisis. Under the deal, the city hired the firm to provide case workers, security guards, janitors and many other employees for the migrant shelters — at initial base rates ranging from $60 to $150 an hour.
Invoices reviewed by the Tribune show that hundreds of Favorite Staffing workers logged 84-hour workweeks — with the overtime, paid at a 50% premium, helping balloon bills that topped at least $56 million. At a Woodlawn shelter in early February, for example, two-thirds of the 50 staffers logged working at least 12 hours a day, seven days a week. At the Streeterville site one week in March, roughly 8 in 10 workers logged the same hours.
The detailed invoices help explain how costs to shelter migrants have swelled this year amid a growing debate about how well the city has managed the crisis.
Exactly what happens inside Chicago’s nearly two dozen migrant shelters has largely been a mystery to the public because the city has chosen to keep the media and even volunteers out. Yet what’s becoming more clear — from a Tribune investigation of city records — is how costly the arrangement has been, in a system staffed by an outside firm hired by city officials under pressure to act quickly and allowed to operate largely out of public view.
The Favorite Staffing invoices are filled with rows of employee names showing the dates, shifts, pay rates and number of hours they worked, including overtime. A Tribune review of those invoices offers a window into how Favorite Staffing’s revenue grew under the deal.
Just how much remains unclear because the city has not released most invoices filed by the vendor, including the most recent four months’ worth. It comes at a time when the city is
pushing both the state and federal governments to help cover
a larger share of the growing costs of migrant care.
A contractor from the migrant shelter in the former Inn of Chicago cleans the sidewalk outside the shelter on Oct. 18, 2023. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
Although the city has not released complete records of payments, the $56 million billed by Favorite Staffing from September 2022 — as migrants had begun arriving in Chicago — through June reflected roughly two-thirds of all funds the city spent on all migrant services, records show.
As
city officials still grapple with how to respond to the expanding 14-month-old crisis, the revelations in Favorite Staffing’s invoices sparked complaints and outrage about how two mayoral administrations have managed the arrangement — much of it funded by the state.
Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd, who represents the downtown ward where the security guard worked at the Inn of Chicago shelter, said the fees being charged there have been “insanity.”
“The conditions that exist there are deplorable,” he said, “so the fact that we’re paying so much to get so little in return is very frustrating.”
A former aide to Mayor Lori Lightfoot described the amount of hours billed as “not surprising” given the scope and urgency of the services, while Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s spokeswoman defended the payments as a frustrating byproduct of a nationwide worker shortage at a time staffers are most needed to help open and run shelters.
“A humanitarian crisis that requires 24/7 staff at multiple sites throughout the city unfortunately will result in staff working overtime,” Pritzker spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh said in a written response to questions.
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s representatives did not address questions on the volume of overtime the city has paid out, but did note the city has twice renegotiated the deal to lower rates, including a push to hire local workers that includes even steeper discounts on fees.
Favorite Healthcare Staffing, a 42-year-old firm based out of suburban Kansas City with 30,000 employees across the country, is not new to Chicago or Illinois. It has received contracts from both the city and state going back years and been paid more than $1 billion for work at state veterans homes and to assist with the COVID-19 pandemic, city and state records show.
The Favorite Healthcare Staffing office sits along the 5500 block of North Cumberland Avenue in Chicago. (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)
The firm declined to make a representative available for an interview. In an emailed response to questions from the Tribune, the firm didn’t address questions about the overtime it billed the city.
A senior vice president at the firm, Keenan Driver, said in the statement that the firm charges “fair and market-based” prices that also cover overhead costs beyond the checks it cuts to its workers. Driver also said city officials manage the sites and that Favorite Staffing treats employees and migrants fairly.
“We have developed a world class staffing model that provides speed and flexibility but also focuses on employee safety and satisfaction,” he said, later adding: “Favorite is committed to working to continue to provide high quality services to assist the City of Chicago in navigating this crisis.”
A quickly signed deal
The company — part of an international group owned by private equity firms — became the city’s key vendor in September 2022, less than a month into the crisis after a cobbled-together collection of
nonprofits and volunteers struggled to keep up with the hundreds of migrants sent by bus from the southern border.
In a sign of how rushed the deal was, Lightfoot’s administration piggybacked off a state emergency contract with Favorite Staffing for pandemic workers. The state deal listed specific positions and hourly rates. The city contract simply changed the names of jobs and kept the same pay rates.
So a “certified nursing assistant” during the pandemic — paid $75 per hour by the state — became a resident aide for migrant services in the city contract. A “pandemic healthcare worker” — paid $100 an hour by the state — became “shelter security.”
When asked why, a former Lightfoot administration official, Nubia Willman, recalled that the city was pressed for time to staff a shelter system largely built from scratch. And the state had already vetted Favorite Staffing for the pandemic deal, she said, so the city didn’t have to follow the normal, cumbersome bidding process.
“We did not want to disrupt services, and we couldn’t afford to disrupt services, because we needed to maintain that stability as we continued to build the shelter operations and continued to figure out our long-term plans,” said Willman, the former director of the Office of New Americans.
That shortcut came with a price.
For anyone working more than 40 hours a week, the city paid Favorite Staffing an extra 50% per hour, or time-and-a-half. So if a security guard — with a $100-an-hour fee — logged 84 hours a week, for example, that last 44 hours was paid at $150 an hour.
That scenario played out for scores of workers, week after week, in invoice after invoice reviewed by the Tribune.
In one week in early February, the city was billed nearly $460,000 for 50 Favorite Staffing workers at one shelter: a former elementary school in Woodlawn. Of the 50 staffers, 36 listed they worked all seven days that week and 12 hours each day.
A security guard walks toward the former Wadsworth Elementary School on Oct. 18, 2023. The building, in the 6400 block of South University Avenue, became one of nearly two dozen migrant shelters in Chicago. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
A third of that shelter’s workers were listed as security guards. Every one of those 13 guards logged at least 20 hours of overtime that week. Most logged 44 hours of overtime, on top of the regular 40 hours that week. That meant the city spent roughly $18,000 a day for security at the shelter — about $11,000 of it just for overtime.
It wasn’t unheard of for Favorite Staffing-supplied workers to put in that much time, on occasion, in contracts with Illinois government either.
Favorite Staffing’s pandemic deal with the state included an expectation that health care staff would work 72 hours per week in health care facilities to help battle COVID-19.
After migrants began arriving on buses late last summer, the state turned to Favorite Staffing to help staff hotels where some of the new arrivals were given shelter. A Tribune analysis of state records shows that in early January, near the height of the operation, 1 in 5 workers logged at least 84 hours in one week.
But the city-administered contract — as it moved into late winter and early spring 2023 — saw even higher rates of overtime, the Tribune found.
View an invoice from Favorite Staffing below:
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24062980/inn_of_chicago_pp_end_20230310.pdf (
archive.org)
When asked why so many of its employees worked overtime in Chicago’s shelters, Favorite Staffing officials did not offer a direct response. Nor did it answer why it didn’t dispatch more people to Chicago to cover more shifts that would limit overtime.
For sure, Favorite Staffing didn’t profit from all the money collected in overtime fees. Like any staffing company, the firm must pay its employees from the fees it collects, and it is obligated to pay overtime to employees who work more than 40 hours per week.
Still, it’s unclear how much of the total fees it collected from the city was passed onto its workers as pay, how much was left to cover the firm’s overhead, and how much was profit. Favorite Staffing declined to discuss those details.
Favorite Staffing operates in an industry that saw revenues surge in recent years, and that level of overtime could have been particularly lucrative for the firm, experts said. Such firms typically have overhead costs for things like recruiting, insuring and housing workers, which can come out of the difference they charge employers versus what they pay their staff.
If the firm has a smaller number of staffers but works them more hours, the overhead can be limited while the staffing firm profits more from overtime fees.
“There’s just far more incentive to work fewer people a ton of overtime,” said Bob Bruno, a University of Illinois professor of labor and employment relations.
A city-provided spreadsheet of payment records, covering invoices submitted through late June, doesn’t break out how much was paid in overtime fees. But those records show that, overall, in February, the firm invoiced the city $7.5 million. The next month, the firm nearly doubled what it billed the city.
In mid-March, available invoices show Favorite Staffing had dispatched more than 300 employees across Chicago, staffing at least 11 shelters. The week ending March 10, all but six were logged as working some overtime with more than 200 staffers logged as working at least 84 hours.
In essence, Favorite Staffing told the city, roughly 2 out of 3 of its workers put in at least an average of 12-hour days, all seven days.
When asked about the amount of overtime, Willman, the top Lightfoot aide on the migrant crisis, was not critical of what was billed.
“For many, emergency staffing is their career and the workload is not surprising,” she said in a statement. “It sounds shocking to a lay person, but this is difficult, time-consuming, nonstop work.”
But Bruno said he’s never heard of so many people in such a contract working so many hours, comparing it to hours people typically worked in the late 19th century. He said the level of hours reported “certainly does seem extraordinary.”
And that worries Annie Gomberg, a volunteer who helps migrants at the Austin District police station.
Gomberg said no one working with migrants can be at their best when they are exhausted, working over-80-hour weeks: “These are human beings, not machines.”
Eight weeks in a row
The Tribune requested records from the Johnson administration detailing Favorite Staffing’s shelter work. The city responded with a breakdown of costs billed through June that totaled $56 million but said it was too burdensome to provide all of the invoices that detail those payments. Instead, the city handed over only invoices for February, March and May of 2023, which it said it had already provided to two other media outlets. One of them,
NBC-5, reported Tuesday about those Favorite Staffing invoices.
While invoices showed regular 84-hour workweeks for some employees, others worked even more hours. One worker was logged as pulling five 12-hour shifts, a 14-hour shift and a 16-hour shift that week in mid-March. For his work alone that week, the city was billed $15,525.
That person worked at the city’s most populated shelter: Inn of Chicago, at Ohio and St. Clair streets.
The employee worked at the same shelter as the security guard who was logged as working 12-hour shifts at least 56 days in a row for the Inn of Chicago site and another shelter. The city didn’t provide invoices for the weeks before or after that 56-day stretch, so it’s unclear if he logged working an even longer string of days this winter and spring.
The guard, when reached by phone, told the Tribune he began working for Favorite Staffing in November, but said that he’s not working at a Chicago shelter anymore.
“I don’t have time for those kind of questions. I’m really busy right now,” he said. Then he hung up.
Other Favorite Staffing employees approached by the Tribune declined to speak, and Favorite Staffing did not respond to a request to make employees available for interviews.
The guard was among 83 people who worked at the Inn of Chicago during a period this spring in which the Tribune had invoices to examine. Of them, 38 logged working at least three weeks in a row without a day off. The guard was among nine who logged at least four weeks in a row without a day off.
Another way to look at it: In every week that could be studied, at least 1 in 3 workers said they worked at least 84 hours a week. At most, 8 in 10 workers logged that many hours a week.
It’s unclear to what extent the city audited the invoices, which is allowed under the contract. Ald. Maria Hadden, 49th, says audits are needed.
“Somebody needs to be really going through this with a fine-toothed comb and making sure in real time, before we’re cutting these checks, that the monthly amounts that they’re billing us actually equate to the work that they’re performing,” she said.
The invoices came just after the General Assembly tightened the state’s law forbidding employers from making people work seven days in a row in Illinois. The law requires at least 24 consecutive hours off every seven days, with some exceptions.
Firms seeking exemptions can ask the state for waivers. The state Department of Labor said it has no record of receiving waiver requests from Favorite Staffing, nor complaints the firm broke the law. It noted some exemptions that might apply, such as for security guards, supervisors, those in a “bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity” or those needed in the “breakdown of machinery or equipment or other emergency.”
Regardless of the legality, the amount of hours logged by employees raises questions of worker productivity and safety. Researchers say that people working long hours are more prone to poor health, while being less productive with poorer cognitive performance the more overtime they work.
Jose Mendoza, 19, of Venezuela, serves food to other migrants from the back of a car outside the migrant shelter at Inn of Chicago downtown on Oct. 3, 2023. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
“When you’re really fatigued, you have less ability to concentrate and stay engaged in the response at hand,” said Kirsten Almberg, who directs the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Healthy Work.
Reilly, the downtown alderman, in a letter to constituents earlier this month called for the Inn of Chicago shelter to be shut down, citing safety concerns such as public intoxication and narcotics sales, and said the city should “absolutely not” do more business with Favorite Staffing.
“(Look) at their billing practices alone and their failure to maintain security and cleanliness in their facilities, period,” Reilly said in an interview with the Tribune. “And the fact that this administration is slow to release these invoices and these records — only in dribs and drabs — is concerning to me. It tells me that they’re hiding a much bigger problem, which is we are hemorrhaging money.”
Migrants have told the Tribune that, while some staff inside shelters are helpful, others are dismissive, disrespectful and slow to respond to their needs for diapers, food and other resources.
Mayele Marin, 37, from Venezuela found herself at the shelter in the Broadway Armory Park in Edgewater in August. She said the lights stayed on all night. One staffer blatantly ignored her when she asked for help getting food and resources. She didn’t know where to look for work and spent most of the day begging for food, because the shelter-provided cereal and pasta wasn’t enough. She pointed to a carton of Coca-Cola on the sidewalk she got from a volunteer, and said she wasn’t allowed to bring it inside.
She had most recently
been sleeping on the floor of a police station, waiting for placement inside the city-run shelters. She said she wished she’d stayed.
“What purpose does the government have with us? We don’t know,” she said in Spanish, sitting along North Broadway Street as pedestrians walked by in business clothes. “What is going to happen to us?”
‘I wonder what they’re hiding’
Favorite Staffing told the Tribune that the city’s Department of Family and Support Services leads the management of all sites, while the firm places on-site lead workers at every shelter and embeds staff with the city’s Emergency Operations Center.
Johnson’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications spokesperson, Mary May, said “city teams” monitor shelters “for a variety of things, including general operations, safety, and security.”
The city has said it keeps everyone out of the shelters — other than migrants and workers — to protect migrants’ privacy. That bothers some volunteers.
“I wonder what they’re hiding,” Ruth Lamour, a volunteer for migrants at the Austin police station, said about the shelters. “You wouldn’t send your child to a day care that you couldn’t go inside. You wouldn’t send your children to a school that you couldn’t have access to.”
Vehicles are positioned in a way that obscures from public view migrants arriving at a new shelter near the intersection of South Halsted Street and West Cermak Road on Oct. 3, 2023, in Chicago. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
Favorite Staffing workers even tried to shut out a City Council member, according to that alderman.
Ald. Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez, 33rd, told the Tribune she stopped by a few days after the Brands Park shelter opened in her ward during the last weeks of the Lightfoot administration. One Favorite Staffing worker stopped her and said she needed to schedule visits in advance.
“They couldn’t keep me out,” Rodriguez Sanchez said. “I still went through the door, and I said, ‘No, I’m not leaving.’”
After forcing the issue, which she attributed to the “corporate” mindset within such private sector companies, she was able to work with Favorite Staffing employees to improve conditions, Rodriguez Sanchez said.
A go-to contractor
Favorite Staffing’s contract with the city for migrant services is only the latest in a string of deals with the city and state government.
In 2017, then-Gov. Bruce Rauner brought the firm in to help staff a state-run veterans home in Quincy that was the site of multiple deadly outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease.
When the pandemic hit, Pritzker’s administration hired the firm for a host of needs, from staffing a short-lived field hospital at McCormick Place to dispatching nurses to understaffed hospitals. Workers staffed vaccination clinics too, a task from which controversy emerged.
In late 2021, a former Favorite Staffing nurse filed a lawsuit alleging she was unfairly suspended for warning local and state authorities that the vaccination site she was helping run, in Des Plaines, was being overstaffed. In her whistleblower lawsuit, she alleged one Favorite Staffing representative admonished her and told her: “What happens in Favorite stays in Favorite.”
That pending lawsuit joined others filed by ex-workers in four additional states. The other lawsuits alleged Favorite Staffing either unfairly fired or underpaid workers. In fall 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor pushed the firm to pay an additional $3 million to 1,677 workers who’d done COVID-19 testing in Florida.
When asked about the lawsuits and federal action, Driver, the Favorite Staffing executive, responded: “To the extent that workplace issues arise, we pride ourselves on taking swift and proactive steps to address them thoroughly.”
None of the controversies stopped Favorite Staffing from keeping and getting more deals with the state and city through complex rules that allow government entities to bypass some competitive bidding requirements in a crisis.
The state used a formal bidding process late in 2020, when Favorite Staffing was chosen from seven bidders in a competitive process for a new “master” contract for emergency staffing — the one the city eventually piggybacked on to staff migrant shelters.
Frequent mayoral critic Ald. Anthony Beale, 9th, said such expensive contracts should require input from the City Council and questioned whether Favorite Staffing’s high invoices were “a cash grab.”
“When you have crises like we’re dealing with right now, you’re going to get people who take advantage of the situation,” Beale said. “There’s a whole (adage) called, ‘Haste makes waste.’ When you’re in a hurry to do something, you’re going to be wasteful, and that’s what you see right now.”
In a statement, Johnson’s administration said the city renegotiated a rate drop in April and another that started Oct. 1. Under the new terms, a security guard’s regular hourly rate, for instance, eventually dropped from $100 an hour to $68. If the guard was a local resident and didn’t need a hotel room, the rate would drop to $48 an hour, the city said.
The state contract is expiring Nov. 16, meaning the city can no longer piggyback off it. City officials did not answer if they would continue to use Favorite Staffing.
A person looks out a window from the second floor of the Inn of Chicago migrant shelter on Oct. 18, 2023. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
If Favorite Staffing continues to staff Chicago shelters, it would join another firm, GardaWorld Federal Services, which the city hired last month under
a nearly $30 million deal to put up migrant “yurt” base camps across the city to house some of the 18,700 migrants who’ve arrived on more than 400 buses from Texas as well as planes and other transportation modes since August 2022.
In the meantime, as of Friday, shelters staffed by Favorite Staffing housed nearly 11,300 migrants. Another 650-plus stay in a section at O’Hare International Airport. More than 3,000 sleep in police station lobbies or outside, while city officials struggle with how best to pay to house them.
Whatever is decided, Ald. Walter Burnett, 27th, said he hopes the city can learn lessons from its rushed contract with Favorite Staffing.
“And hopefully, we can start saving some money,” he said.
