Pay for Jury Duty

Min

We pay employees their regular rate of pay for Jury duty when they are off- My dilema is our handbook CLEARLY states: "You will receive your regualr paycheck, but you are required to endorse over to the hospital ANY checks received from the court", I have an employee pushing the issue that part of her check was for mileage and she is entitled to that- I stated that according to the handbook any checks received are to be turned over. I would like info from anyone on this. I have called a few other HR departments, but do not have very many answers yet. Would you have them cash the check and take out their mileage or, according to the handbook, take the whole check- I feel we need to follow our handbook.
Mindy

Margaret Morford

Mindy,

State law normally has legislation about jury duty, so you need to check those statutes in your state. However, most states permit the employer to recover any money paid to the employee for jury duty as long as the employee is receiving full pay. I believe the thinking is that if they receive full pay that's better than the meals and mileage they get from the courts. Remember, if they were coming to work, they wouldn't get mileage for that.

With that said, many employers are letting employers keep these checks (1) because the amount is usually small, (2) the hassle of depositing and reapplying the money to the Payroll Account is usually more trouble than it's worth, and (3) it's good employee relations and encourages people to do their civic duty.

Margaret Morford
theHRedge

Mikki H

Our policy allows for 5 paid days for jury duty (per incident, each year would be separate of course). In Florida the court gives the juror a form that asks if they are being paid by their employer and we require the employee to state that they will be paid for the first five days. The employees are also instructed that they are not allowed to accept jury pay for any time that they are also being paid by us under the jury leave plan. We had not thought to word our policy to clearly indicate all payments such as mileage though. Of course, since the form is filled out at the courthouse, we never see the form and really do not know what the employee is actually doing. We do not actively investigate if the employee has received any payments, however, if we find that the employee has violated this policy, it is a written disciplinary action. As best that we can guess, we haven't have any trouble with this policy, but again, we really do not know.

MKT

Beyond the 5 paid days, what is the employee's situation? Does the employee have the option of using available paid time, or, is the employee required to use available paid time? Can the employee elect to be unpaid?

I had a situation where an employee was a juror for a trial that lasted nearly 2 months, we opted to pay the employee the entire time. We changed the policy and eliminated the 2 week limit. In addition, employees can keep jury pay.

Do most companies limit pay for jury duty?

Mikki H

In general, we have a "no unpaid time off" policy to avoid people taking the afternoon off unpaid and saving up paid time for other days. However, this is one of the special circumstances where we allow the employee the option to take the additional jury time as unpaid days. We have not had any trouble in our 12 year existence (knock on wood), the maximum time that an employee has needed was 2 days.

skipper

Our employees receive their regular rate of pay when away from work for jury duty. We had required employees to turn over their $10/day pay from the court to the company. I revised the policy recently to allow the employee to keep the money from the court, for the 3 reasons stated in Margaret Morford's response.

Theresa Gegen TX

A good issue was brought up by an earlier post. If your policy allows for unlimited paid jury duty, you may want to revise it to put a limit on the paid time off (for example 2 weeks -- most trials will be completed in that time). If your company ever gets stuck with an employee on a trial like the OJ Simpson case (that went on for about a year), under an open ended policy, your company would have to continue to pay for the entire time.

Good Luck!

DB

I'm with city government in IL. We allow employees to keep the amount they receive for mileage when serving jury duty. They must bring in the check (or stub) showing have much was paid for what (mileage, service) and then pay us the proper amount. They keep the actual jury duty check and pay us in cash or by personal check. Hope this helps.

Min

Thank you for all of the responses. They have all been very infomative and helpful to me and our administrator. We ended up keeping the checks because of what our policy and handbook state. However, one of the two employees was not happy- we, eventually, will revamp our policy- but for now we keep the checks.
Thanks again.
Mindy