WC- Vacation pay

Gator · April 2001

I have an employee who is not actively at work due to a worker's compensation injury. Our handbook provision states that employees are eligible for vacation pay after one year of continued service. Is this employee eligible to receive his vacation pay although he is out on worker's compensation?

Melynn · April 2001

Hi Gator,

We recently had this situation and paid the employee their vacation time. We felt that the employee's status had not changed and as an employee they were still eligible for the vacation pay. However, this was a learning experience for us and I am in the process of chaning our policy to include a minimum number of hours worked clause in there to avoid this in the future.

Paul · May 2001

We as a general policy do not award sick leave or vacation leave when an employee is out on Workers' Comp leave. If I am not mistaken, the only place where you can get hung up if you decide to not award the vacation leave is if the Workers' Comp injury gets tied in with FMLA. Under the FMLA when a person returns to work, they have to be awarded all benefits the same as if they had never left. Under the current WC laws, you are not required to provide this benefit during a leave period.

Min · June 2001

I recently had an employee out on workers comp and I was wondering about the sick time and vacation time. When I called our contact for workers comp, I found that an employee can not earn more with the vacation/sick and the workers comp than the person would receive gross in a week. The only thing hard for you is to find out what the employee had earned in a week with workers comp. It may be different in your state, but this is what I found from our contact.

Anita · June 2001

Our company policy states that you stop accruing vacation after 30 days of absence, other than FMLA. The employee is allowed to use any time they have on the books, but will not accrue anymore until they return to work. If they are gone less than 30 days they don't lose anything. We have a time loss schedule that is used to determine how much the employee will lose from their next vacation.

dhnyct · June 2001

Please clarify a previous posting...
Our PTO and holiday accrual policy is based on hours worked. Once an employee exhausts their PTO and is on a status of "unpaid leave", there is no further accrual of PTO or holiday. Are you saying that when an employee returns from FMLA we are obligated to award the PTO/holiday hours they would have accrued??

Anita · June 2001

Yes, my understanding of the FMLA is that it is to be treated as if the employee was working during that time. Any accrual for PTO or Holiday would continue as if they were at work.

CuriousG · June 2001

The Family Medical Leave Act requires a covered employer, who has an eligible employee take a Family or Medical Leave to treat that employee as if they were present at work during their absence. This means they are entitled to any benefit(s) they would have earned by working, they continue to accrue any service/accrual based benefits (hence Anita's policy about stopping vacation/PTO accruals after 30 days absence except for FMLA), etc.

If you have a progression compensation system that would have awarded a progression increase during the FMLA leave the employee is entitled to that. They can not be disciplined for attendance problems based upon the FMLA leave -remember they are there at work as far as you are concerned.

WC- Vacation pay

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