The California Labor Commissioner’s Office reached a $658,948 settlement with a Los Angeles residential care facility.

The settlement was to compensate 34 workers who were reportedly not paid for all hours worked. The LCO began investigating reports in 2023 that workers at Edgewood Residential Facility were working up to 24 hours a day and seven days a week, barred from leaving work, not paid for all hours including overtime, forced to work through rest and meal breaks, and were given wage statements without required information such as overtime or late meal periods.

The settlement collects wages and damages with $608,948 of the total payable to the workers for overtime wages, minimum wages, meal period violations, rest period violations, waiting time penalties, liquidated damages and wage statement violations. The remaining $50,000 is owed in civil penalties payable to the state.

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A Southern California nurse is ending her career on a bittersweet note after an accident left her paralyzed from the chest down.

Deanne Niedziela was a nurse director at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo who oversaw the Spine and Neuroscience Institute and Acute Care Service. She has worked for over 30 years in healthcare, dedicating her life to saving others.

She was on a dream vacation visiting waterfalls in Costa Rica that turned into tragedy after a tree limb fell down and crushed her spinal cord. 

After a nine-hour life-saving surgery, Niedziela survived but she was paralyzed from the chest down.

“This is a tragic accident that happened to me, but it’s outside of my control,” Niedziela said. “I can’t turn back the calendar.”

Niedziela flew back home and for months, she spent her time recovering in the same hospital she dedicated her career to.

“I just really appreciate the caregivers who took care of me,” Niedziela said.

She said being cared for by her colleagues has been fulfilling in many ways.

“The patients come and go, but it’s the coworkers that make this workplace so special, and this is a special place at Mission Viejo Hospital,” she said.

On Friday, Niedziela was surrounded by her colleagues at the hospital for an honorary farewell.

Coworkers said Niedziela has always been a guiding light to others and remains so after working decades in the industry.

“To have taken care of patients and to have led the Spine Institute and to have been a patient participating in that is really just an extraordinary triumph of courage and strength,” said Cherri Fox, a nursing director and Niedziela’s colleague. 

Niedziela will now be shifting her focus to the next chapter of her life as she works on regaining her independence.

“Nobody gets a [farewell] reception in the lobby, so having them to do that and have such a special reception for me, I just know my coworkers are just amazing people,” Niedziela said.

While making her final rounds at the hospital, she reflects on her time spent there, recalling all the happy memories spent in a rewarding career she adored. 

“I’m just so blessed to have so many wonderful people in my life,” Niedziela said tearfully. 

A GoFundMe page to help Niedziela cover medical expenses and costs to make her home ADA-compliant can be found here.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The California Legislature on Thursday rejected many of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s most difficult budget cuts, choosing instead to speed-up a temporary tax increase on some businesses to help pay off an estimated $45 billion deficit while preserving spending on many social safety net programs.

Thursday’s vote was not really a public rebuke of Newsom, a Democrat who for the most part has had a good relationship with a Legislature dominated by members of his own party. Lawmakers had to pass a balanced budget before Saturday in order to keep getting paid while negotiations on a final spending plan continue.

Instead, the Legislature’s proposal outlines the differences between Newsom, a second-term governor who many believe holds presidential aspirations, and a liberal state Legislature that is often more willing to take risks.

While Newsom’s budget proposal preserved most of the state’s major assistance programs, he included a number of smaller cuts that angered his Democratic allies. He proposed to stop paying for in-home caretakers for some disabled immigrants on Medicaid. He wants to eliminate a program that helps provide housing for families with incomes less than $13,000 per year. And he suggested delaying a rate increase for organizations that care for people with intellectual disabilities.

To reject these cuts, lawmakers needed to find more money. They found it by taking one of Newsom’s ideas and making it happen faster.

Newsom proposed temporarily stopping some businesses from deducting financial losses from their state taxable income, thus increasing their tax bill. It has become a common way to increase revenue during budget shortfalls. The Legislature chose to do this, too, but their plan would start the tax increase one year earlier. That generated an extra $5 billion in revenue compared with Newsom’s plan.

Lawmakers also found large budget cuts in other places. They want to cut $1 billion out of the state’s prison budget, arguing the money isn’t needed now that the prison population is about half of what it was two decades ago. And they want to cancel a $400 million loan to PG&E that would help extend the life of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.

One major issue that has yet to be addressed by either side is what to do about a minimum wage increase for health care workers that is scheduled to start on July 1. Newsom signed a law last year that would eventually raise health care workers’ minimum wage to $25 per hour over the next decade.

The wage increase is expected to cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in increased wages for some state workers and increased payments in the state’s Medicaid program, according to an analysis by the University of California-Berkeley Labor Center. Newsom has said he wants to delay the minimum wage increase, but he so far has been unable to get an agreement from the state Legislature.

Republicans, who don’t have enough numbers to sway policy decisions and say they were left out of the budget negotiations with Democrats, criticized the Legislature’s spending plan as unsustainable. Republican state Sen. Kelly Seyarto accused Democrats of “divesting” from the state’s prison system “instead of fixing it and creating a system that works for all of us.” And Republican state Sen. Roger Niello said it was dangerous for Democrats to assume the state would collect more revenue next year than what the Legislative Analyst’s Office had projected.

“One of the easiest ways to balance a public sector budget is just to assume more revenue and you don’t have to deal with that until the year is over,” he said. “This budget is balanced nominally. But it is not sustainable.”

Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener said the Legislature’s budget is a plan “we can all be proud of.” He defended the budget cut for prisons, saying “it is absolutely absurd that we have reduced our prison population by 50% and yet we’re spending more on prisons.”

“We can have accountability for committing crimes without going back to mass incarceration,” he said.