Forced to use vacation time

[pattytx]

I'm assuming if you want to have that time as paid during a planned vacation, you could just not get paid for the time you don't work.

Some employers don't allow that; it would be up to the employer. And if the OP is exempt, he MUST be paid for the full day, one way or the other.

 

[cyjeff]

There is no law in any state that says an employer cannot demand employees work overtime.

The employer must pay that time appropriately, but the actual insistence upon mandatory overtime is perfectly legal.

Maybe your southern employer is simply busier than your northern one was.

 

[cyjeff]

Right To Work is an Orwellian term, it prohibits workers from bargaining collectively with management because of a "hypothetical worker" who might be denied employment by choosing not to be part of the union. It's strange, like opposition to ObamaCare being about our freedom not to have health insurance.

Good... a hijacked rant about unions. Those are always fun.

About a year ago I was hanging around outside of a warehouse and I noticed that the day shift was leaving at 3M. I asked what was going on and the workers told me that things were slow, so they are let go early. That's cool, I thought, a paid afternoon off, but no, actually they weren't being paid, they get let go early, but the hours were deducted from their pay. A couple of weeks after that, at the same place, I saw the opposite. The women were on break, pacing around outside, chattering into cell phones. They were kind of freaking out, and one woman was crying. I asked again what was going on and they said that they were just informed that they were required to work mandatory overtime that evening and they were scrambling to have their kids picked up from Day Care, etc. I never saw that outside of the South, not even in non-union shops elsewhere.

See previous post.

Perfectly legal and happens all the time. You just haven't been paying attention.

I would like to think that when you're hired, that you have an implied agreement that for a certain amount of hours, you will be compensated at a certain wage. That said, you can budget your family time and money. You know, Pursuit of Happiness and all that.

Your thoughts and opinions have no bearing on law.

Failing a CBA, you have no guarantee of hours... either time worked or released.

Work for Hire is another situation, and again, you're at the short end of the stick. If you are fired unjustly or discriminated against in any way, and you want to do something about it, then burden of proof falls completely on you. This is why virtually all employees "let go" nowadays, get no explanation as to why. Also, your intellectual property and creativity belong to the employer. Without going into detail, many years ago, I was hired on a short term basis, rather like a freelancer, but in reality, a Work for Hire. I knew that the minute I picked up a pencil owned by the company, that what ever came out of it belonged to them. But I worked very hard and developed a new product line, the marketing plan, and related graphics. Eventually, I was let go, as I knew I would be, and the company ran with my ideas and is still selling the product today with the same graphics. I can't say that I ever expected anything else, but I wish I had some rights, the patents, or the copyright. I could have easily had, if I had only worked as a freelancer or with a work contract.

And here we finally come to the crux of your rant.

You think that being a freelancer or with a work contract wouldn't have STILL given ownership of your work to the company paying you to produce it?

You can always design things RIGHT NOW that you own and then license that material to others that want it... but it is rather a scattergun approach.

So, I'm sorry, if I sound like I'm complaining, I'm really not unsatisfied with my current work positions. It's just that since I've moved to the South, I've noted a marked difference in the relationships between the employer and employee, compared to the North, where I originally come from. They never treated workers in the exploitive and oppressive ways that I see down here. The weird thing is that the workers here take it with few complaints. I was just expressing MY OPINIONS about the situation, and I thought they were germane to original post.

This is simply crap.

You moved to the south, worked for one employer and now profess to be an expert upon how all employer and employees within an entire geographic region react to one another.

You could always move back north where your employers were so wonderful. Why is it that you moved, again?

 

[pattytx]

Good... a hijacked rant about unions. Those are always fun

And this is the second thread in two days that choosymother has hijacked for her own rants.

Choosymother, knock it off. This is in NO way helping the OP.

 

[hambirg]

Some employers don't allow that; it would be up to the employer. And if the OP is exempt, he MUST be paid for the full day, one way or the other.

Ok, I was assuming because the OP said that he/she clocks in that OP was not an exempt employee, but I could be wrong. I was just going off of what I have encountered. And I think we can both agree that it is completely legal for the employer to require you to cover the time you did not work with vacation/sick leave time. If the OP does not want to use his/her vacation time, then all OP has to do is clock in on time and clock out when his/her shift is over.

 

[pattytx]

Ok, I was assuming because the OP said that he/she clocks in that OP was not an exempt employee, but I could be wrong. I was just going off of what I have encountered. And I think we can both agree that it is completely legal for the employer to require you to cover the time you did not work with vacation/sick leave time. If the OP does not want to use his/her vacation time, then all OP has to do is clock in on time and clock out when his/her shift is over.

I don't disagree, s/he probably is. Just saying, for the benefit of others who may be reading this thread and have a similar issue.

 

[thoth200]

Ok

Ok for those of you are still don't understand why this would upset some of the employees. i will explain. I understand that if i leave early the company has every right to say you must use vacation time to make it up. We have already established that. Here is where it gets silly. I ok the place i work is for a HOA repairing member's irrigation systems. My work hours are from 7am to 3pm or later, we use to be able to get all the overtime we wanted. So lets say we finished a job at 2pm we don't have time to do the next job unless we stay past 3pm which up till this year was OK but now they said no overtime, which is totally understandable. This however leaves on some days like the one i explained above with an hour of nothing to do. Some people would just clock out and go home some would stay till 3pm. Then they decided to make a new rule that if you don't get 40 in a week you must use vacation time. Think about that it is not a rule that if you leave early you have to use vacation time it is if you don't get 40 hours in a week. So if i clock in at 7am exactly i must clock out at 3pm exactly to get the 8 hours. if i however clock out 2 mins before 3pm i have to use 2mins of vacation time, now there are about 50 people that work for this company and 1 time clock so even if you all line up at exactly 3pm to all clock out someone will be clocking out after 3pm thus getting overtime which in not allowed. Does no one see the problems with this they now have made it so we are just sitting around waiting for 3pm to get here wasting payroll. Which is fine by all the employees. Now the company is saying we are way over budget in payroll and will have to cut hours. Just think about that for a min we are now setting around at the end of the day wasting payroll because no one wants to use there vacation time to leave before 3pm but he have no more work to do. The company has put in place two rules that just are silly and compete with each other. They say you must use vacation time to make your hours 40 in a week and that they are now cutting hours by 4 hours a week to save on payroll but we will have to use vacation time because cutting out 4 hours a week does not get us to 40. So they are still paying us for 40 hours so they have not cut back on payroll. Can no one but me see this is not a good way to manage budget? they would have never been in this over budget if they would let the people go home when the jobs for that day are done and not force use to use vacation time if we do.
Ok so i get all this is legal just trying to explain why i asked if it was.

P.S. To top all that off the company gets paid by the job when it is done. So cutting hours might save on payroll but makes the intake of money go down. So i foresee that when they are under budget with the amount to money we are to take in they will make up some new stupid rule

 

[pattytx]

If the employer wants to pay to the minute, he can do so. Letting employees have "all the overtime they want" is a bad business decision.

It's not overtime in your state unless you work over 40 hours in the workweek; NC does not have daily overtime.

If you don't like the employer's "stupid rule", you can go find another place to work. You start making a big deal out of it, and you may find that there ARE no more vacation accruals (which would also be perfectly legal; employers do NOT have to offer vacation). With millions of people out of work in this country, I'm sorry, but I don't have a lot of sympathy.