Holiday pay

rroberts

Our policy on holiday pay is that the employee must be employed for 30 days prior to the holiday to be paid. We have a new exempt employee with less than 30 days and we will be closed July 3 & 4. Do we pay the exempt ee for both days regardless of our policy?

HRCalico

Well, rroberts, I keep hoping that someone will answer with a quote from chaper and verse so I can chime in and say "yeah"! It seems that I read in one of the CFRs that it should be paid. I quietly waive our 60 day waiting period for holiday pay for our new exempt employees (although there are not many). I'll be darned if I can come up with the link, though - ever since the DOL revamped their website, I can't find anything.

So the short answer is - we pay it.

Leo

All full-time employees are eligible for holidays upon hire. (Granted we only receive 3 holidays a year.) Our handbook states you must work the day before and the day after the holiday to receive holiday pay, but I don't think we actually enforce that. If we wanted to, could we enforce it for hourly employees?

HRCalico

Federal law doesn't provide for holiday pay, so it is either state law or employer's discretion. We tried a similar policy but I think we're throwing it out the window on our next revision because it isn't much of a problem for us, and we didn't want to punish the poor guy who broke a tooth Memorial weekend and wanted to get into the dentist ASAP on Tuesday morning, for example. We would excuse it with a doc note, but you know how easy those are to come by.

Three holidays? Ouch.

NaeNae55

I think I read these posts wrong because I am a bit confused by some of the answers.

Exempt employees must be paid for the entire week if they work any part of it (except 1st week and last week of work). Whether you charge it to holiday pay or not is up to you. They get the same amount either way.

If I am wrong, let the barage begin!


Nae

HRCalico

Nae, if we confused you then I bet we confused a lot of people. Leo's post and my 2nd post refer to non-exempts only (sorry for the threadjack, rroberts).

I think you're right on - exempts receive their salary and you can call it holiday pay or whatever, as long as you don't dock them.

(Assuming that if they don't receive holiday pay yet, they probably don't have any accumulated vacation time or anything yet. If they did have vac time, that bank could be deducted in lieu of holiday pay and they'd still get their week's salary. But I digress.)

Better? Or do I still not make sense? :>)

rroberts

I think you are right too. Exempt ee's get full salary if they work any part of week. It's our decision to be closed not the ee's. So I'll go with that answer. Thanks.