A North Philly home-care worker is speaking out against a noncompete agreement that landed her in court

Janeci Suarez-Martinez, a health aide, earned $12.50 an hour caring for a disabled person in North Philadelphia ― physically difficult work that can involve intimate tasks such as feeding, bathing, and assisting an adult with using the toilet.

But when she was willing to stay with a patient who switched to a home-health agency offering more hours of care, she ended up facing a $12,000 claim in court.

The dispute landed Suarez-Martinez, a 32-year-old mother of three who cannot read or speak English, at the center of an increasingly charged national employment-rights debate.

On Jan. 4, she was sued in Philadelphia Municipal Court by her former employer, All American Home Care LLC, which alleged she broke a noncompete agreement by going to work for the new agency.

The next day, the Federal Trade Commission said it wanted to ban noncompetes nationwide, arguing that they are especially harmful to low-wage workers like Suarez-Martinez, because the agreements prevent them from taking higher-paying jobs. The FTC is accepting public comments through April 19.

The proposed changes did not prevent Suarez-Martinez, who came to Philadelphia 13 years ago from Puerto Rico, from getting the letter about the small-claims lawsuit.

“I started getting very anxious. I was really nervous because I wasn’t sure what to do,” said Suarez-Martinez, who speaks Spanish and communicated with The Inquirer through an interpreter.

She said she tried to convince the client to go back to her former agency, then sought help from Community Legal Services of Philadelphia.

On March 16, after Suarez-Martinez obtained legal representation, All American Home Care withdrew its small-claims lawsuit.

Suarez-Martinez’s lawyer at CLS said All American did the right thing when it withdrew the claim.

“It was wrong of them to bring the action in the first place,” said the CLS lawyer Brendan Lynch. All American also withdrew cases against six other home-care workers it sued on the same day, Lynch said.

The claims were not enforceable under Pennsylvania law, Lynch said, in part because the geographic scope of the restriction was too broad. The employment agreement said Suarez-Martinez would not be allowed to work in home care in Philadelphia or any contiguous counties for 12 months after leaving All American.

All American, which employs 2,000, still believes its claims were sound, said Brett Datto, a lawyer at Weir Greenblatt Pierce LLP representing the North Philadelphia company, but withdrew them because of the uncertainty over the future of noncompete agreements after the FTC proposal.

All American alleged that the seven aides it sued in January took clients to other agencies that the company gave them to care for, Datto said. The “sophisticated employment agreements” it uses are designed to protect All American’s interests, he said.

Suarez-Martinez said an All American representative sat with her and explained in Spanish some parts of her employment agreement, but not the one that included a noncompete clause. She worked there for 2½ months, having previously worked for multiple local home-health agencies.

Her client wanted to move to a new agency because All American was not providing all the hours of care that its government insurance provider, Medicaid, had authorized, Suarez-Martinez said.

It’s not unusual for the Philadelphia region’s more than 40,000 direct-care workers to move with their clients to new agencies. Individuals receiving home-care services also prefer to have just one person or as few people providing the services as possible, rather than having a string of caregivers they don’t know cycling through.

“Patients ought to be able to stick with caregivers that they are comfortable with,” said Lynch, the CLS attorney. “These are people coming into their homes. These people sometimes help them bathe. It can be very intimate.”