Accruing Vacation while on vacation????

Evswife

Our employees accrue vacation and PTO time. For non-exempt, they accrue both based on hours worked. Exempt accure on an 8-hour day, 40 hour week. However, none are allowed to be used until you have reached your anniversary date (unless you have accrued/unused time on the books). If an employee has 80 hours in a pay period and 20 are vacation hours, 20 are PTO hours and the other 40 hours are reg. hours worked...here is my question...would they accrue vacation/PTO time based on 80 hours or 40? We are not quite clear when calculating the hours to determine the accrual if we are to include vaction hours and PTO hours. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

marc

Our shop accrues vacation and sick as long as the EE is getting paid - so yes, they accrue while on vacation.

The only time these accruals stop is when they are no longer being paid, but can still be an EE, such as when on FML or other unpaid leave.

Evswife

Sorry...I am revising my question. Here goes...Non-exempt employees at our company accrue vacation and PTO time on any paid time including time taken for PTO. However, employees do not accrue vaction and PTO time when taking a paid vacation day. If we have an FMLA protected employee who takes FMLA leave and it is unpaid time, do they accrue vacation and PTO time. If we do not allow the FMLA protected employee to accrue vacation and PTO time while on FMLA leave, are we violating their FMLA rights? Yes, I know that is a very revised version of the question. Thanks.

marc

Ok, thanks for the clarification. I still have the same answer. We run sick and vacation time concurrent with FML until those leave banks expire. So while the EE is being paid, he/she will still accrue the time. The minute they are on a leave that is unpaid, they no longer accrue time. So if I understand your question, if it is unpaid FML time, the EE would NOT accrue time, and that is NOT a violation of their rights. In our case, we are treating the EE on FML just as we would any EE on an unpaid leave, so no accrual is justified. If you let other non FML EEs accrue time on unpaid leave, then you must allow the FML EE the same accrual.

Make sense?

Whirlwind

Same here. Additional paid leave (vacation and sick leave) accrues while on paid leave, and it does not accrue while on any form of unpaid leave, even FMLA. The additional stipulation is that they cannot extend the current absence by using leave that accrued while absent. They must return and be physically present for the leave to be available for use. Also, our pay period is monthly and employees accrue leave monthly (one day of sick and a varying amount of vacation based on length of service), so they earn an accrual of each if they are in a paid status for any portion of the month.

Don D

Don't overlook the fact that no federal or state law requires your company to give employees vacation. So, although the responses you get are representative of the policies of the respondents, ultimately, your policy is whatever you decide it is.

POPEYE

All of the responses are correct but must be consistently administered per your policy. If you allow accrual for Mary Jane taking PTO to go to Bermuda then you must allow Rodney Joe to accrue time when out on FMLA for open heart surgery.

Policy - policy - policy and consistent - consistent - consistent.

Evswife

Thanks to all of you for your input. That is what we thought. We just wanted to make sure we didn't miss something. Thanks again for your quick responses.