offering benefits to part-time workers
dd
4 Posts
Help! Our company policy stipulates that benefits will only be extended to full-time employees (full-time employees being defined as individuals who maintain a minimum 30-hour work week); however, a valued employee has been offered part-time hours with full benefits by a competing company. In an effort to keep this employee, senior management would like to extend the following offer to this employee only - a 20-hour work week with full benefits. Can this be done?
Comments
We've just extended that to employees who work under 30 hours. We have high school students who only work 12 hours a week, then we have 20 hour a week part-time workers. They now receive Vacation, Personal Time and Sick benefits using the same formula we had for full-time employees who work less than a traditional workweek. The only thing they can't get is the Insurance because we have documents restricting it to employees who work 30 or more hour a week.
Part-timers working less than 30 hours a week have always been entitled to the 401K plan if they worked over 1,000 hours a year - by law.
Formula for example: We provide 5 sick days a year = to 40 hours. If an employee works 4 days a week, they would receive 4 days of sick time = to 32 hours. If the employee has been hired to work a specific number of hours, such as 20, over the 5 day week, that employee would receive 20 hours of sick time. The same logic applies to all the eligible benefits - it's quite simple.
We did it because we rely on these employees; they fill a very specific need in our company. The cost of these benefits is actually quite minimal. The only thing you have to watch for is "over time". Let's say you hire someone for a 20 hour 5 day workweek. You base all your benefits on the 20 hours. You then discover that the employee works 25 - 30 hours regularly. The employees workweek should be redefined to reflect reality. You could argue that a 40 hour a week employee has their benefits based on a 40 hour week, but may actually work 45 hours a week. I've maintained that that employee has received overtime pay for the 5 hours; the part-timer gets straight time because even with the increased hours, they still don't work 40 hours a week. We watch this pretty closely. I'd be interested in anyone else has concerns over this.
Hope this helps.