Asmussen to pay $563K in settlement with Labor Department

Steve Asmussen, the trainer who recently set the all-time wins record in U.S. Thoroughbred racing, has reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Labor requiring him to pay $563,800 in back wages and penalties for failing to pay overtime wages to grooms and hotwalkers during a four-year period from 2016 to 2020, according to court records.

In the agreement, Asmussen agreed to pay $281,900 to the 170 employees affected by the allegations and an identical amount in “liquidated damages.” The agreement states that Asmussen acknowledged the failure to pay overtime to the employees and “failing to make, keep, and preserve adequate and accurate records.”

Asmussen was sued by the U.S. Department of Labor in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York in the summer of 2019. The consent agreement requires the back wages and fines to be paid within 30 days.

The average settlement in the Asmussen case, with damages, amounts to $3,312.

Through Sept. 8, Asmussen has won 9,481 races in his 35-year training career, with total purse earnings of $365.6 million, according to Equibase records. He maintains large training operations in a number of states.

Asmussen was sued by the federal government in 2012 and 2015 for labor practices. In both cases, the trainer settled. All of the suits have contended that Asmussen paid flat rates for labor without properly recording hours worked and paying for overtime.

Federal and state labor investigators began focusing on trainers in New York in 2016. Chad Brown, Linda Rice, George Weaver, Kiaran McLaughlin, and Gary Contessa have all acknowledged reaching settlements with state and federal labor officials over labor violations in the past five years.

Trainers involved in the settlements and their attorneys have contended that the racing industry has been slow to modify its labor practices to account for modern timekeeping protocols and to adjust their operations to ensure that workers are paid for overtime.

Grooms and hotwalkers work throughout the day, and their hours are highly variable, due to the racing industry’s longtime practice of training horses early in the morning and then racing in the afternoon and sometimes at night. For decades, trainers have paid daily or weekly rates for grooms and hotwalkers, without adjusting their practices to account for hours worked in a single day.

At the same time, trainers have said that they are struggling to find workers at the current pay rates and conditions of employment. Phil Gleaves, a longtime trainer who retired this week, cited the difficulty in finding workers as one of the main reasons for leaving the track, as have other trainers, including McLaughlin.

Many U.S. trainers rely on the H-2B visa program to find workers, most from Latin America. The program has its own requirements aside from U.S. labor laws, and labor lawyers who represent trainers contend that the cost to process a single visa is approximately $10,000. Several of the trainers who reached settlements with labor investigators were fined for violations of the program’s requirements.