No. 23-3683 ___________________________

Vince Micone, 1 Acting Secretary of Labor, U.S. Department of Labor

Plaintiff - Appellant

v.

Levering Regional Health Care Center, L.LC.; Reliant Care Management Company, L.L.C.

Defendants - Appellees

Richard J. Destefane

Defendant ____________

Appeal from United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri - St. Louis ____________

Submitted: September 24, 2024 Filed: March 26, 2025 ____________ Before GRUENDER, KELLY, and GRASZ, Circuit Judges. ____________

1 Vince Micone is now Acting Secretary of Labor, and is substituted as appellant pursuant to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 43(c). KELLY, Circuit Judge.

Vince Micone, the Acting Secretary of the United States Department of Labor (Secretary), brought suit against Levering Regional Health Care Center, L.LC. and Reliant Care Management Company, L.L.C. (collectively, Levering) for violating the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The suit alleged that Levering deducted 30 minutes of pay for employees’ meal breaks, even though it knew or should have known its employees routinely worked through those breaks. The district court granted Levering’s motion for summary judgment. We reverse and remand.

I.

Reliant Care Management Company is a healthcare management company that manages Levering Regional Health Care Center, a residential care facility. Levering employs healthcare workers in its nursing department to provide direct care for its in-patient residents. These workers include nurses, certified medical technicians, quality-of-life advocates, hall monitors, and residential care coordinators.

During all relevant times, Levering automatically deducted 30 minutes from nursing-department employees’ time sheets for a lunch break every day. At the same time, Levering had an unwritten policy (the Time Sheet Policy) in place for employees who missed their lunch so that Levering could pay those who had to work through the break. The Time Sheet Policy required employees to submit a Temporary Time Sheet, signed by their supervisor, indicating that they had worked during their lunch break.

From March 2020 through January 2021, Anne Thomas, an investigator with the United States Department of Labor, Wage, and Hour Division, investigated Levering for potential violations of the FLSA. Thomas’s investigation focused on the period from February 13, 2018, to February 12, 2020 (the audit period). During her investigation, Thomas interviewed more than 40 Levering employees, most of

-2- whom were employed in the nursing department. Many of these employees told Thomas that they either never received a lunch break or frequently had their lunch breaks interrupted. More than a dozen employees told Thomas that it was impossible for them, and others, to take lunch breaks because there was no one on the floor who could relieve them from their duties. Other employees told Thomas that they either never or rarely got a lunch break because they simply did not have time due to the amount of work they had to complete.

In these interviews, Thomas also received conflicting accounts about workers’ knowledge of the Time Sheet Policy. Of the nineteen employees Thomas asked about the policy, five of them (including one employee who supervised all nursing staff on the floor) did not know about the Temporary Time Sheets, and fourteen of them did.

Based