Paying people by the shift - exempt or non?

Leslie

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 05-30-03 AT 06:09PM (CST)[/font][p]I posted this to wage and hour and received one response (thanks SandiF, at least one person cares). If anyone has knowledge of paying people by the shift, or knows of a site to go to to try to figure this out please, please, please let me know.

I have three departments that pay supervisory personnel "shift pay." We treat their benefits like they are hourly. However, if their shift is for 8 hours and they work 9, they receive another quarter shift - essentially two hours.

If they work 6 8-hour shifts in a week, they make regular shift pay for the last shift.

Do we have the right to define how many hours are in a shift? The manager of the department wants to make their shift 8.5 hours. Would that make us liable for overtime? Or should we be anyway as described in the second paragraph?

I don't have any idea if these people are exempt or non-exempt. Anyone out there have experience with shift pay?

ray a

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 05-31-03 AT 12:08PM (CST)[/font][p]
First, if these 3 employees are supervisors, they probably should be exempt. We currently have one 2nd shift supervisor who is exempt, but also gets shift differential. Every employee's pay is loaded into the payroll system as an hourly rate, so anyone working 2nd or 3rd shift receives the same shift percentage added to their base rate, whether exempt or non-exempt. The payroll system is programmed to pay exempt and non-exempt employees according to the respective laws, all we do is make sure the employee is properly classified in the system.

So, all non-exempt employees receive OT pay after 40 hours. We pay all exempt employees below the director level (I'm a director x:-() straight time after 44 hours. The first 4 hours of exempt time in excess of 40 hours is non-paid. To do that we have to manually deduct the hours in the payroll system. When we initiated this system, several exempt ee's complained that we were altering their time. I called the state (NY) DOL and they deferred to the federal DOL. The federal DOL didn't care how we paid our exempt ee's as long as we paid them for 40 hours per week keeping within the FSLA laws. For hours in excess of 40 per week we could pay them straight time, OT, not pay them... it didn't matter. They didn't care.

It sounds like you are doing essentially the same thing - paying additional compensation to exempt ee's. No problem as long as you follow the exempt rules. Go ahead, make an 8.5 hour shift if that is what it takes to get the job done. If you went the opposite direction to a 7.5 hour shift, you would still have to pay 8 hours.

WT

For your exempt people, you need to take a careful look at how absences are handled. FLSA will not let you have the best of both worlds. A salaried person working any amount of time in a given week is paid the same amount regardless of quantity or quality of work. Thus a salaried person can work more hours without more compensation or they can be compensated at straight time rather than time and a half for hours over 40. However, if they miss some hours in a given day, you cannot dock their pay (they can use paid time off if they have it). If you do have a practice of docking pay for hours of work missed, essentially these are hourly workers.

I hope this helps.