Vacation

PDalton

If a company closes from Christmas until New Years every year can they force exempt or non exempt employees to use vacation days for their shceduled work days or take the time off without pay?

nohr4u1yr

We are closed Thanksgiving Day and the day after as well as Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We only pay for Thanksgiving and Christmas Day and require our employees use any accrued PTO time to supplement the other two days otherwise it is without pay. They don't have the choice to take it without pay so they can use the PTO time another day.

Don D

What about the ones who do not have PTO or vacation accrued?

hhaynal

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 11-18-04 AT 08:25AM (CST)[/font][br][br]I am approaching this from a different angle. Holidays aside for a moment; if a company shuts down operations for a period of time, say one week, all employees, exempt and non-exempt alike do not get paid, unless they choose to cover the shutdown period with time from PTO banks etc. I have never come across a situation where employees were forced to burn PTO while company is shutdown.

Now, taking the holidays into consideration. Company recognizes and pays its employees, say for example, 9 holidays per year, two of which are Christmas and New Years. Company has shutdown from Christmas through New Years. Employees would receive two paid holidays during the shutdown period in their paycheck. If the employee wants a full paycheck then the remaining days would need to be covered through PTO.

Hunter1

Yes. Since vacation is not a required benefit, the employer can attach almost any requirement to it that they want. Used to work in a production facility, and all of our employees had to save/use 1 week of vacation for our annual July shut-down. No choice on the employees' part.

cthr

Check your state law as employees who do not have paid time available may be able to collect unemployment.

E Wart

We have this situation in one of our Plants. The GM requires employees to save enough time off to cover this period. (In otherwords, their time off during the year is "reduced" by enough to cover this time off. I believe he is in the right to do this. However, if an exempt employee didn't have the time off (say was a new employee), if this time off didn't cover an "entire work week", I don't think we could dock him since he is ready, willing and able to come to work and we won't let him.
Also, another thing to be careful of. Some employees who don't have time to cover their absence (mostly non-exempt) could go apply for unemployment if they don't get paid something during this period. You may want to check with your state labor dept. on this.
E Wart

dynamite9551

at my previous employer (a manufacturer) we too shut down between xmas and new years - we gave our standard holidays, eg xmas eve and day, new years eve and day and all the other days in between were covered with accrued vac or without pay. However, we notify our employees on 1/2 of the new year when the holidays will be observed and how many days will be required for the "shut down", we have yet to have a problem with this - the EE's know well in advane how much time they need to save and if they have none then they take without pay.