Salaried VS. Hourly - Do you treat them the same?

March22Collector

We've had several hourly employees who have used their FML over the years, but have not had any salaried employees take FML until recently. In our current policy, we use an employee's vacation time at the beginning of their leave, for both hourly and salaried. This, of course, has caused quite a commotion with the salaried employees who feel that they should be given special perks because of their status as salaried. My question to you all is, do you take vacation at the start of FML for both hourly AND salaried, or do you separate the two and make it a perk for a salaried employee to not have to utilize their vacation time at the start of FML? Either way, would it be OK to treat the two differently when it comes to FML? Thanks for your thoughts!

Don D

March: Our policy requires salaried ees to burn their paid vacation concurrently starting at the inception of the FMLA, as well as paid sick time if it's personal illness FMLA. We have a union and our contract requires that the hourly ee's save two weeks vacation for use when we have bi-annual maintenance shutdown (we call it vacation shutdown for UI purposes). Therefore, we do have two separate and distinct policies on concurrent leave use. In this state, it would not be a violation of any reg to have two separate policies, one salaried and one hourly, as long as the FMLA regs are followed and those regs address this as the employer's option. Would of course do it consistently within the two groups once the policy is defined and published.

ritaanz

As far as FMLA is concerned, we treat the exempt and non-exempt/hourly the same. Any vacation and personel/sick time they have coming to them is used concurrently with FMLA.

HRMaiden

Our policy states that during the first 6 weeks of FML, the employee has the option of whether or not they wish to use paid time off. After 6 weeks, it is mandatory that their vacation or other paid time off is used. This applies to salaried as well as hourly-paid employees.

Whatever

Our written policy treats all ees the same. If you want to treat salaried ees differently, then it should be part of a written policy. The policy is always to do things as uniformly as possible.

sonny

Ditto the above, we treat them the same

Rockie

I believe in the case of FMLA, you can choose to require them to use the leave or not use the leave, but the company does have to specify this and I believe it has to be uniform, across the board. I don't believe the FMLA regs will allow you to treat one segment of the employee population differently than another in regards to this particular law.