Nurses Who Faced Fines, Lawsuits for Quitting Are Fighting Back

A couple of years ago, Novie Dale Carmen paid $20,000 to quit her nursing job. She was less than halfway to fulfilling the three-year commitment she’d made to Health Carousel LLC, the health-care staffing agency that had helped get her from the Philippines to a hospital in Muncy, a town about three hours northwest of Philadelphia. From across the Pacific, the deal had seemed like a good one, but once she was in Pennsylvania, she began to feel differently.

Carmen says she was paid much less than the American nurses around her. She was banned from discussing her working ...