Salaried Who Go Into a Negative Leave Status

Rockie

Please correct me if I am wrong. If a salaried individual exhausts all their PTO and is out sick a day (non- FMLA) and they don't have leave to cover it - it is my understanding that they cannot be docked for this time since they are paid a salary, not an hourly rate? I am trying to explain this to a numbers cruncher who thinks this is not fair to hourly people and that exempts are getting paid for nothing!

System

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 06-27-02 AT 10:27AM (CST)[/font][p]Here is an excerpt from an article in the HRhero.com members area that should help:

[blockquote]"Deductions from exempt employees' pay: avoiding FLSA liability"

You may reduce a salaried employee's pay for absences of a day or more because of sickness or disability ONLY if you do it under a bona fide plan, policy, or practice of providing compensation for loss of salary because of sickness and disability. In other words, if you have a paid sick leave policy, you may deduct full-day absences for sickness before the employee qualifies for the plan or after he has exhausted his leave allowance under it.[/blockquote]

Another thread on the forum might shed some light (or confuse the issue more?):
[url]www.hrhero.com/employersforum/DCForumID17/43.html[/url]

From what I can gather, IF you have a bona fide leave policy in place, you can deduct leave time from their leave bank in partial days. Once they've run out of leave time under your policy, you can deduct pay ... but only for full-day absences. Again, this is only if you have a bona fide plan in place. Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this.

Law Center members* can search for the full article referenced above by logging into the members area at [url]www.hrhero.com/lc/[/url] and clicking "Search for articles by keyword" in the Newsletter Archive.

Christy Reeder
Website Managing Editor
[url]www.HRhero.com[/url]

*[link:www.hrhero.com/benefits.shtml|Click here] for more info on Law Center membership.

njjel

At a recent HR seminar I attended we were instructed that if a company did have a defined # of sick days and had used them all up only full sick days could be deducted from an exempt employee.

Don D

Christy: Would you please address the exempt ee who is out due to wife's illness (and she just died yesterday), had exhausted his FMLA as well as his vacation and sick leave and the company was good enough to let him continue with needed absences and retain his engineering job; however, the extended absences were without pay.