How can salaried employees be required to take paid time off when the hosp. employer closes for a hurricane?

Question

A friend and I work for a hospital. She is a salaried full time employee. Recently the facility closed due to Tropical Storm Faye. No one worked. Yet all the employees, if they wanted to be paid for that day, were "charged" eight hours of their accrued paid time off. If they had none, they were not paid. These same employees are asked to work overtime when needed (without pay) but are never allowed to leave early if they have no patients. Any HR experts out there?

Answer 1

An employee at will doesn't have any right to work. The only limitations on this would be an employer's own guidelines, which they have to follow if published and furnished to employees, or, if there is a union, a union contract.

But, if employees are asked to work overtime without pay, you need to take that up with your state labor board. That is illegal.

Answer 2

Does not sound right might want to run this by the Labor Relations Board.

Answer 3

A hurricane is an act of God, beyond the control of the employer, and therefore the employer does not have to pay the employees who are unable to work.

As for the overtime issue, you need to check both your state's labor laws AND federal labor laws.  In many occupations where employees are salaried, the employer is required to give them compensatory time off if they work overtime.  The whole point behind salaried employees is that they work whatever hours are needed to get the job done, but they are also rewarded - usually with comp time - for all the extra hours.  There are rights that go in BOTH directions once employees become salaried.  The employer does NOT get all the rights.

My husband works in IT and some years ago worked for one of the largest and richest companies in the world.  Their department was so understaffed - and management refused to allow them to hire the additional people - that everyone worked in excess of 50 hours a week, EVERY week, and more than 60 hours a week nearly half the time.  Turns out one of the wives got fed up with the company refusing to acknowledge the overtime, so she called the US Dept. of Labor.  It didn't take long - a 3 hour conversation and a faxed copy of the relevant codes - to find out that all these IT guys fell into one of the categories that could not be denied comp time.  By the time the company moved that department to another state, and my husband found another job so we could stay here for our daughter's last year of high school, he had only worked for them for 4 years and they owed him almost 4 MONTHS of comp time.

Not every occupation falls under that same set of guidelines.  But the guys at the Atlanta office of the US Dept. of Labor are real good about figuring out who does or who doesn't.

Answer 4

No employer is ever required to pay employees for time they did not work due to a shutdown beyond the employer's control (an Act of God).

Answer 5

yeah so?

she is salaried, so in exhange for not counting hours, she doesn't get paid for "overtime".

if she wants to get paid overtime, she can find a job where she has to count hours.

her job is to be available during certain times. if no patients are there, too bad, but that is also part of being salaried in a job like that where the work arrives in (well I was about to give you the technical, mathematical term for the time distribution of patient arrivals but I will spare you , you know what I mean...)

if she doesn't want to be paid for the time off during the storm, she can save her hours for another time. no one will object. she just won't get paid - it is an act of God.

If this is a difficult concept for her, I recommend she not work in places like Buffalo where this probably happens with snow many times a year!