Salary PTO time

easyspirit

I am a salary employee and in management. I took a PTO day one Friday and had to come in and work Saturday of that week. When I did the payroll my boss forced me to still use a PTO day for Friday even though I worked a full day Saturday. I think she is wrong and need to back it up with proof. Can I go somewhere and find salary employment guidelines somewhere. My boss will give comp days off to other salary employees during the week if they have put in some long hours.

turbo

I don't know the real answer to your question but I do know that from now on I would use a sick day on a Friday when I needed off, and then still be sick when I got the call to work on the next day which would be a Saturday. Did others who worked with you on Saturday get comp time? Where you the only one asked to work Saturday? If so was it retaliation for taking Friday off?

If your boss has taken advantage of you in the past like this and not offered you comp time when others have been given comp time then you do have some issues you can bring up - especially if there is a written policy. There are legal guidelines for comp time policies that must be adheared to in order to avoid being penalized for abuse of the law.

For example earned comp time must be given and used in during the same pay period (same week)- which could have been done in your case

If this is a regular occurance, you may want to think twice about your exempt status? Just because you are salaried doesn't mean your exempt.

santire

As an exempt employee you can be required to put in all the time your boss may consider necessary for the job. Not fair, true. Yet on some matters the law does not mandate fairness. However, even in this situation there is some fairness. If your job were to take les than the full week, you still need to be paid for the full week. It is helpful to understand this whole idea of comp time. The way we often use it can be confusing. “Comp time” is the short hand version of “compensatory time” which the DOL uses in interpreting the Fair Labor Standards Act. The whole idea is that a non-exempt employee can defer getting paid for overtime and take that money as compensation for subsequent leave time. This is allowed for non-exempts in the public sector but not for non-exempts in the private sector. Note that the entire idea of comp time is to bank unpaid overtime to get later as paid vacation. To do this for exempt employees defeats the entire concept of the exemption which is that exempt employees do not get paid for overtime (on the idea of not getting paid for extra time as opposed to “overtime”, of course, there are some exceptions though employers need to be very careful of how they do it.) If the employer wants to give an exempt employee paid time off, that is fine. As long as the employee still gets his or her full salary for the worked period, no problem. Call it Comp time, call it PTO, call it what you will. Of course, you do not need to pay an exempt employee for personal time taken in increments of at least a day. However, comp time cannot, as it is for nonexempt employees, consist of deferred payment for extra time worked. The bottom line is that any concept of comp time should not affect the salary basis of the exempt employee’s compensation. Some courts have specifically questioned whether an employee paid something resembling comp time similar to that for public sector non-exempt employees can be an exempt employee.

easyspirit

I was told that my work week was Sun-Sat and if I work my 40 hours I should not have to take a PTO (vacation day) for the Friday I took off since I had to come in and work Saturday. I was looking for a hard copy of our Tn. law that might state that. My work week almost always consists of 60+hours a week. I rarely get to leave after an 8 hr day and I am usually at work 30 min early so it is not like I take a lot of time off during work time.

Shadowfax

I don't think you'll find the answer in the law (Santire pretty well went through that), but in your own co's policies. If the co policy re PTO is that it is charged against a bank for regularly scheduled work missed which is otherwise uncompensable (for exempt emp/ee that means full day personal,full day sick if pto policy in place, or other time beyond a full pay period) then it seems the policy is being applied correctly, even though it does not seem to be a fair result. If other exempt are getting some sort of 'comp'time for extra hours worked, you may have an issue, but as Santine correctly explains, compt time is generally not avail in private sector - so no harm, no foul - or, your co is jeopardizing its' entire exempt staff.