new time policy

What is the name of your state?MA

I have been employed by my company for 12 years and my boss has just brought this to our attention. Our vaction time is based on the amount of time we have been employed at the company, I get 3 weeks for being here over 5 years. My boss now says that if I work less than 40 hours in a week, say 36 hours, then 4 hours of vacation time/sick/personal time must be used to make up those 4 hours. I do not think this is right? Can someone give me an answer?

Are you an exempt or nonexempt employee?

non-exempt

I am paid hourly so that would make me non-exempt, correct?

Very likely. In that case, your employer may very well require you to take vacation time because you didn't work your full hours for the week. However, what does the company policy say? Your employer may do this automatically, assuming that is what you wanted. When this situation occurs, can you request in writing that the time off be taken without pay?

Many companies do not provide in their policy for such intermittent "time off without pay" because that is what they provide the vacation benefit for. The vacation benefit is, among other things, the amount of time the employer thinks they can do without the employee on a short-term basis. If employees were able to take unlimited time off without pay, then take their vacation as well, they would be off more than the employer intended by providing the benefit. If it were abused, they might decide they didn't need that employee at all.

policy

He has been working on an official company policy for a couple of years now but the employees have never seen it. We had a old policy before my company changed names, same employer, employees, everything, just a name change and that is where our vacation policy was taken from.

What you are describing is perfectly legal and not uncommon. I fully understand why you don't like it; I wouldn't like it myself. But it's perfectly acceptable under the law.

Thanks

thank you for your help, I do agree it sucks, just seems my boss is trying to get over on us. thank you