salary issues - is this right?

2406663

Our full time employees are paid on a semi-monthly basis. Regardless of how many hours in a given pay period (80,88,96) they are paid the same gross amount
(calculated as yearly divided by 24 pays). The reasoning for this is that the company claims that they are salaried employees - which isn't true because if you are out any given pay period - you need to use vac or sick to make up those hours or take it leave without pay. I think that they should be paid hour for hour and not have their salary adjusted by the 24 pays (ie. salary 25,000 is paid @1041.67 per pay). Overtime is paid correctly, however. Is this legal?

moneyman

We once used this method for our FT, permanent hourly employees and were told that it was perfectly legal, as long as we made the proper adjustments,in a timely fashion, to pay the hourly employees for their actual time worked. They received 86.67 hours per semi-monthly pay period (2,080 annual/24). They were still required to fill out a time sheet. We collected time sheets once a month, then recorded vacation, sick and paid overtime. The biggest problem we had with this method is that they never built in a "lag time" for payment. So, when we collected timesheets around the 25th of the month, employees were estimating what their worked time was for the remainder of the month. When they got paid on the 30th/31st, it was for work performed up through that day.

We changed our method several years ago because: 1) we decided that we were not following the rules of "accurate" record keeping. 2) it began to be a problem with having to make adjustments in the 15th pay cycle for mis-reported time. 3) employees found it confusing with the adjustments being made.

We decided to change to a bi-weekly pay, one week lag time, and paying for actual time worked within each period. It has been much easier since then.