Reducing Employee Hours

tem

Most of our hourly employees work 36.25 hour weeks. A couple of years ago we assigned our mailroom staff to 40 hour work weeks so that they could handle the outgoing mail after everyone else has left for the day. (This helped us so that we knew that they had to be here until 5 p.m. to get the "last minute" mail out.) We have a mailroom staff employee who was diagnosed with "tennis elbow" and cannot handle the routine mail procedures so we changed her description to handle administrative functions for the department. Other department employees handle the outgoing mail tasks.

My question, can we legally change her hours back to 36.25?

Hatchetman

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 01-28-02 AT 07:31PM (CST)[/font][p]If your standard work week is 36.25 hours except for those individuals in the mail room BECAUSE you need THEM to be there until 5 to handle the late mail, and this employee doesn't handle the "late mail", what would be your justification for not having her work the standard company work week of 36.25 hours? You could have morale problems if employees start seeing some "unfairness" in the way the work week standard is implemented.

I don't think there is a problem with the law unless you have a disparate (unintentional discriminatory) impact on women and minorities in your "36.25-hour" work week criteria (and you can't expound a documented business reason for having that threshold) or you intentionally are discrimnating against women and minorities in the application of the "lower threshold" for overtime.