One way or another, your employer is violating wage and hour laws.
ANY employee, no matter what their job duties, can be paid on an hourly basis. An employee who is paid on an hourly basis, only needs to be paid for the time they actually work. If they do not work, your wages can legally be docked. However, if you are paid on an hourly basis, your employer MUST pay you overtime for any hours over 40 in a week (and in your state and a few others, over 8 in a day) that you work. That overtime MUST be at the rate of time and a half for the overtime hours. This is mandatory. (There are a VERY few exceptions with regards to very highly paid computer professionals, who can be paid hourly without OT, but that is VERY much the exception to the rule.) Employees who are paid hourly are called non-exempt employees.
There are some employees, established by their job duties, who can be paid on a salaried basis. These employees are called "exempt" employees. It is SOLELY your job duties that determine whether or not an employee is exempt. An employer cannot simply make you salaried for the purpose of not paying overtime. If you are an exempt employee, then you get paid your full salary every week regardless of how many hours you work. If you only work 30 hours a week, you still get your full salary but if you work 50 hours, you still ONLY get your salary; you do not get overtime or any additional compensation. (There are a few, rigidly controlled exceptions when an employer is legally allowed to dock an exempt employee's salary, but these exceptions are few and far between and only in VERY limited circumstances). It IS legal for the employer to require an exempt employee to work more than 40 hours a week; many, many exempt employees work 60, 70, or even more hours regularly. There are NO circumstances in which an employer is required to pay a legitimately classified exempt employee more than their regular salary, barring a contract that specifies otherwise.
It is legal to pay a non-exempt employee on a salaried basis as long as they also receive any overtime that they may be due. Certain public employees can be offered "comp" time in lieu of overtime; employees of a private employer must be offered overtime rather than comp time.
If you are legitimately classified as exempt (there is no way for us to know if you are or not - you can check on the DOL web site -
www.dol.gov; look under FLSA and then under exemptions) then your employer is almost certainly violating the law by docking your pay when you are absent. (As I said, there are a few exceptions when this is legal.) If you should be classified as non-exempt, then he is violating the law by not paying overtime when it is worked.
Your recourse is to file a complaint with the state DOL. They take wage claims extremely seriously in your state.
