A good friend of mine, let’s call her Janice, who works with me asked me to post here for her to see if there is anything that she can do. A member of Janice’s family has suddenly become sick and is in the hospital slowly getting better. Janice is staying with them in the hospital and will eventually need to take some paid leave when they are cleared to go home to care for them.
Janice is paid a salary but always works extra hours because she says “this stuff needs to get done” I have urged her for a while to work less and she has started trying to but she still tends to put at least 8 extra hours per week (probably more). Since she is staying with her family member in the hospital she is only able to work 4 hours a day, which at first was fine, until she went to HR to tell them about her situation. HR then told her that if she is only going to be working half days that she will only be paid for half days. Now this really irked me, of course, when Janice was working 50+ hour weeks, HR couldn’t care less but as soon as she needs to get something back from the company, “Absolutely not”.
If Janice is a salaried employee that means she gets paid the same amount regardless of number of hours worked. If she was an hourly employee then she would only get paid for the hours worked. So I proposed to Janice, tell HR to either treat you like an hourly employee or a salaried employee, and if they decide to treat her like an hourly employee to pay for all the unpaid “overtime” (which is very well tracked). The company offers “unlimited” PTO, of course this just means that if your manager approves your time off you can have it, but the managers have been told to monitor the amount of PTO being taken and pretty much to only allow the same amount of PTO that was previously allowed when using the PTO accrual system.
Basically, she was wondering if there was anything that she could do to try and remedy this situation. She has been with this company for 20+ years, and we both kind of expected that they would treat her with any kind of decency at all.