East Coasters and Power outage

Karla Shugart

Hi all of you East Coaster's and others who have experienced significant work interruptions for whatever reason. I'm just curious – can you help satisfy my curiosity?

During the recent power outage, if you had to send people home or cancel work for a day or two, (or other work interruptions) did you:
- compensate your non-exempt employees anyway?
- require them to submit accrued leave if they wanted to receive a full pay check?
- compensate for some hours, require them to submit accrued leave for full pay checks?

My previous job paid ALL employees for hours in which they were not allowed to come to work – typically when the campus was closed during hurricane evacuation season. Here, the employees receive four hours of "suspended operation leave" (typically snow storms) and then may submit leave if they wish to receive a full pay check.

Karla

Parabeagle

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 08-19-03 AT 03:59PM (CST)[/font][p]Well, I'm not from the east coast, but our policy is that if the interruption or the inability to come to work is for reasons beyond our control (e.g., terrorism, fire, weather, etc.) we will close the office and tell employees to stay home and pay them as long as the interruption doesn't last more than two days. If it lasts more than two days, they may begin using accrued/unused leave until they can return to work.

Whatever

We were open on Friday. Any non-union employee who didn't come into work is being allowed to use a personal,sick or vacation day. As for the union employees who didn't come in, we followed the contract. If they could prove they were sick, they could use a sick day. If not, they lost a day's pay. In NJ, where we closed the night shift early, all those ees were paid as if they worked an eight hour day.

ray a

According to our policy if we are closed due to weather, loss of power, or anything beyond our control (can I say Acts of God?), then we do not pay people for the time off. They may use vacation or personal time, or may take it as excused unpaid time off and not held against them on their attendance record.

The day of the blackout, we had to send 2nd shift home early and followed those rules.

sonny

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 08-20-03 AT 11:08AM (CST)[/font][p]Our insurance company now calls them "Acts of Nature"

Whatever

They obviously haven't dealt with the lawyers who have filed a class action suit on everyone's behalf.