Foreign-Born Nurses Who Quit Their U.S. Jobs Face A Legal Nightmare
HuffPost
Workers recruited from abroad sign “stay-or-pay” employment contracts and then wind up in mandatory arbitration with massive debts.
Jyothi Renny says she learned about her $30,000 debt when she received a phone call in January from her old employer, a health care staffing firm called MedPro International. MedPro had accused Renny of violating her employment contract by quitting too soon. What Renny didn’t know until the phone call was that the case had already gone to arbitration. Renny had lost.
“They said, ‘There is a judgment. It’s 30-something thousand dollars you have to pay,’” Renny, 50, said in an interview.
Renny had come from India in 2021 to work as a nurse in a St. Louis hospital during the pandemic. Travel nurses’ pay was soaring, but she says she received just $27 per hour — well below market rate at the time — and struggled to support her husband and two kids in an expensive and unfamiliar country. Within three months she had exhausted her savings and was slipping into debt, she told MedPro in a resignation email. She quit and moved to Texas for a job she says roughly doubled her pay.
But under the terms of her contract, Renny could be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars in damages if she resigned before working three years. She was also bound by mandatory arbitration, which waived her right to sue the company in court. And she had agreed to cover the company’s legal fees if an arbitrator ruled against her. MedPro had sought and won an additional $1,250 from her to pay for its attorney.
Renny is one of many foreign nurses who come to the U.S. and soon feel stuck in their jobs, thanks to what critics call “stay-or-pay” contracts. The agreements require workers to put in a minimum number of hours before leaving, or else they’ll have to pay back thousands of dollars the staffing firm says they owe for licensing, travel, housing and other expenses. The MedPro contracts viewed by HuffPost also include a mandatory arbitration clause.
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