Caregiver Who Worked 149 Hours a Week for Seven Years Wins $830,000 Wage Judgment Against Denver Assisted Living Facility

Aleta Ayo began working at a Meadow Vista Assisted Living house in southeast Denver in 2015. The facility cared for up to eight residents with mental illness, and Ayo was its live-in caregiver, on duty 24 hours a day with no guaranteed relief. For those seven years she was paid a flat monthly salary, starting at $3,000, that bore no relationship to the hours she actually worked.

Documentation from 2016 showed Ayo logging 149 hours in a single week. Across the years she spent at Meadow Vista, her effective hourly rate routinely fell below Colorado and Denver minimum wage floors. She received no overtime pay for hours beyond forty per week. In 2021, after filing suit, she left the job.

The case carried a legal complication. Two prior Tenth Circuit rulings, in 2020 and 2021, had found that live-in workers like Ayo were not covered by state minimum wage and overtime laws under a 'companion exception' and its 'household modifier.' Six days before trial, then-Denver District Court Judge Ross Buchanan issued an order declining to follow those decisions, a ruling that David Miller of The Wilhite Law Firm called instrumental not only to Ayo's case but to future claims by similar workers.

The jury returned its verdict in late 2022, finding that Meadow Vista had failed to pay minimum wage and overtime compensation for years of documented work. Meadow Vista had acknowledged a minimum liability of $325,000 going into deliberations; the jury's findings opened the door to a significantly larger award. In June 2023, Denver District Court Judge Andrew J. Luxen entered a final judgment of $830,737.68. Attorney's fees, estimated at approximately $250,000, were added on top of that amount.

Miller noted after the judgment that the award may be the largest ever entered for a single minimum-wage worker in the United States. The case drew on Denver's own minimum wage ordinance in addition to state and federal law, giving Ayo an additional layer of protection that workers in other Colorado jurisdictions would not have had.