Use of PTO

Jennifer Lynn

I am a salaried employee in Florida and often work in excess of 40 hours per week (since I am salaried, I do not get paid overtime on an hourly basis - the boss says working overtime is factored into my salary). I recently had one day where I had to leave work 2 hours early for a doctor's appointment (on a Tuesday). However, on Wed. and Thurs. of the same week, I worked late to makeup for the 2 hours I missed on Tues. In addition, I still worked in excess of 45 hours for that week. Is my employer allowed to require me to use vacation hours/PTO for the 3 hours I missed on Tues., simply because I did not work a full 8 hours on that particular day? Does this do something to our exempt status as salaried employees?

To give you some additional background, we accrue PTO on a monthly basis, which totals to 12 full working days per year. In the situation above, I wanted to "save" my PTO and not use it on that particular day - that is why I worked extra hours on the other days. Also, we don't actually have a written policy and procedure manual that states we must work a set 8 hours each working day (8:30am to 5:00 p.m.) - if it nets to 40 or more hours a week, how can they force us to use up the PTO? My boss says working eight hours on every day is policy, even if we work greater than 60 hrs. in a week. Would it be different if there was such a policy in writing?

Also, we do have times when required/mandatory meetings are held after "normal" working hours. Our boss does not give us extra PTO or time off for these extra times we are requested to stay late.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my job and my bosses. Part of why I am writing is to try to help protect them from getting sued by other employees if they are doing something wrong. The company is relatively new and I don't know if they know all the labor laws or have consulted an attorney. But as an employee, it is frustrating working so many hours and not feeling like I have any flexibility.

Any advice you can give would be greatly appreciated.

Rockie

This is an age old question and there are several schools of thought on this. I believe the law technically states that an employer cannot dock "pay" of an exempt employee. The law does not specifically state that PTO cannot be docked, so in essence employers are within their rights to dock PTO of exempt employees. Keep in mind also that there is no "compensatory" time for exempt employees unless they work in the public sector. So..there is no makeup time, hour for hour as exempts are not paid hour for hour.

However, in light of the fact that exempts are expected to work until the job gets done, whether this is 8, 10, 12 hours and/or weekend work, I feel it is grossly unfair for an employer to dock an exempt employee's PTO time for leaving early for doctors' appointments, etc. I know if we did this in our workplace, we would have a very big morale problem. The majority of our exempt employees work anywhere from 45-60 hours per week and to dock them for leaving work occasionally would be ludicrous!

So...the short answer is yes, it is legal, but not very smart.

Margaret Morford

I agree with Rockie's answer. One concern I would add to his answer is that this keeping track of hours so closely could lead to losing the exemption. Wage and Hour takes a dim view of employers who use the exemption not to pay overtime, but count hours so carefully (as if their employees were hourly) when it is to their advantage. If you didn't make-up the time, I don't think Wage and Hour would care about the PTO bank being docked. Besides, as Rockie pointed out, this policy is bad employee relations. I would reccomend that your company have a policy requiring the PTO bank to be docked for absences of a half a day or more.

Margaret Morford
theHRedge
615-371-8200
[email]mmorford@mleesmith.com[/email]
[url]http://www.thehredge.net[/url]

Mikki H

Our company uses the policy to dock the exempt employee's PTO only in 1/2 day increments. We did find it unfair to dock the PTO in any increments less than 1/2 days. Our policy also is that we expect you to work your "regularly scheduled" time, which means that if you are scheduled for an 8 hour day, any time less than that would need a determination if PTO must be applied.

We don't like to have any of our exempt employees work more than 40 hours a week, we try really hard to encourage only 40 hours, but we realize that it will happen on occasion. Usually it is just a hour here or there, none of this 50-60 hours regularly. Since we do not usually have long weeks, we felt it was fair to use the 1/2 day rule. I think that if we had consist longer weeks we would think about changing to a full day rule.