I am currently employed at a large company in Texas. I have been with the company for a little over 3 years now, and just recently I have been having some issues regarding underpayment of wages (this has never happened to me before, and they have always been on time with full pay before this). The underpayment was roughly equal to around half my usual paystub. My leave started on January 14th and ended on February 14th.
We are paid semi-monthly, so the two payments from end of January and February 15th were both roughly half of my typical salary.
I have gone through the normal routes of HR in an attempt to pay back wages owed to me, but after many ignored emails and contact attempts, they finally remedied the underpayment ~45 days later.
The DPC (Disability Pay Continuance) plan I am enrolled in guarantees 100% of “base salary “ for up to 12 weeks. I had only used about 4 weeks, so should’ve been receiving 100% of normal salary pay.
To make matters a bit more complicated, I had received an 8% raise which would’ve started on February 1st. The amount I had been given on March 1st assumed my base salary from when I began DPC, and did not include the additional amount that would account for the raise from Feb. 1st thru 15th.
I had very politely pointed this out to HR (I understand mistakes happen; I just want what I am owed), and they argued that DPC only covers the salary you start with and does not change through the entire period of DPC, and that they would not give me that additional pay.
Whether or not this is true, I am not sure…there is absolutely nothing stating in the DPC plan that states this is the case, and that DPC is calculated on a semi-monthly basis with the “Base Salary”. But that is a minor matter relative to the rest of the issue.
Due to the lack of pay during that time, I’ve had to pay late fees on credit cards, fees owed to my apartment complex (almost to the point of eviction), and was struggling to get by for almost 2 months because of this.
After being paid the correct amount on my March payslip, fully accounting for the missed wages, several days later I receive a call from HR that they had overpaid me, and are asking me to sign a form that says I need to deduct wages from my future paycheck until the amount is owed.
The amount they are claiming was overpaid ends up being EXACTLY the amount they owed me from my underpayment during DCP. That would turn out to be around a full pay period which they claim I owe back (one semi-monthly payslip).
To add insult to injury, they have been using veiled threats about “my future relationship with the company”, and that if I didn’t sign, it would “seriously sour our relationship with you as a team member”. They also briefly mentioned they would not be afraid to bring in the legal department. All I had said was that I wanted some time to review the form to make sure the calculations were correct, but instead they used fear tactics to try and make me sign the form immediately.
I ignored their “threats “ and have not signed anything yet.
I am wondering if there is any legal recourse I can take here? Should I just sign the document and take the hit of lost wages to make things easy? Would I even have any case at all from a legal perspective?
I have quite a bit of evidence detailing email correspondence, along with payslips and bank statements, if that matters.
Thanks in advance!