Exempt employees using Vacation/Sick Time

atherese · September 2001

Can we develop a policy that would require exempt employees to use vacation or sick paid leave to account for time when they are out of the office for personal reasons? Whether it is arriving 1 - 2 hours late, leaving early, due to personal appointments, family events, etc.

Down_the_Middle · September 2001

Sure, and as long as you have this in place, exempt staff will be required to use the accrued time.

System · September 2001

I have to say that I thought you could require an exempt employee to take sick time or vacation if they took 1/2 day off as long as your policy counts that time in increments of 1/2 days, but was told at an employment law seminar just last week that you could not require an exempt employee to count that time against vacation or sick leave. The seminar leader was very firm in his statement that as long as an exempt employee worked any time in a given day, you could not count any time against vacation or sick leave.

Hope this helps.

jbnunzio · September 2001

You can dock from a PTO bank in any increments you choose. It is when you attempt to deduct hours from an exempt employees pay that you get into hot water.

Rockie · September 2001

You are correct that you can deduct from a PTO bank, but from an Employee Relations viewpoint, I certainly would not advocate doing this to exempt employees who typically work 50-60 hours a week. Docking them for doctors' appointments and occasionally leaving early or coming in late will most certainly cost you more in the long run in morale issues.

Mikki H · October 2001

We only dock the PTO bank in 1/2 day or whole day increments for exempt employees. We encourage our salary administrative staff to only work 40 hours per week. That is the actual scheduled time and we encourage them to GET OUT at the end of their regularly scheduled time. Of course, we also know that people work late here and there, skip lunch etc. However, we felt that by only docking at 1/2 days, we were still being fair since we try to keep even exempt employees to 40 hours. We have not had any complaints on this policy.

lee2 · October 2001

It seems we still have a difference of opinion about the law here. Anyone want to clarify?

System · October 2001

Yes, you can require exempt employees to take leave for a one-hour absence under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It's just that you can't reduce their pay except in one-week increments. A few potential problems:

-- As a salaried employee, I'd be majorly ticked off to have to burn an hour's vacation one day and work nine hours the next day.

-- If I ever want to claim that I'm really non-exempt, a policy like this would be one piece of evidence in my favor.

-- What do you when an exempt employee runs out of leave? You'd have to count it against future leave they earn.

Here's a good article on the subject:
[url]http://www.hrhero.com/headlines/060801/exempt.shtml[/url]

James Sokolowski
Senior Editor
M. Lee Smith Publishers

Exempt employees using Vacation/Sick Time

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