To pay or not to pay vacation pay?
C Wilson
122 Posts
We had a long-term (11years) employee quit on Monday. She had always been loyal & dependable, but not the hardest worker. She left during the middle of her shift, now she wants her accrued vacation pay. We are located in NC so I don’t believe there is any law that requires us to pay her for the accrued vacation. Our policy states that an employee terminating for any reason is eligible to receive pay for earned vacation provided adequate notice is given. Since she did not give a notice. I see not reason to pay her & not everyone agrees with me. What would you do?
Comments
If your state is not one of these and you have a policy such as what you have described in place, then you are okay.
The only issue you have is if you have stepped outside of this policy and paid some employees when they did not give proper notice. I believe you should do one or the other. When you start making exceptions to a policy, you could have a case for disparate treatment of employees.
Just as an aside, there must have been some issue to cause a long term employee to just up and leave in the middle of a shift???
The issue was the woman's daughter also worked here and when the daughter failed to complete her assignments the supervisor had a counceling session with the daughter. The daughter being a hot head, lost her cool & quit, so Mom followed suite. The bottom line is there is a new supervisor over that department and he was requiring them to actually do their job and they didn't like it. I knew they would quit as soon as they were being held accountable. It was just a matter of time.
Just remember to change your policy if you aren't going to consistently follow it. It is very rare that I do a policy exception, it cuts down on the liability.
N.C. Gen. Stat. 95-25.12 and 95-25.13.
By the way, I found this info in an awesome book called 50 Employment Laws in 50 States, whose name says it all. It was compiled by Forum moderator Tammy Binford. I usually don't gush about books that I didn't write x:-8 but this is a very handy reference. If you're interested, you can find a sample chapter here:
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James Sokolowski
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