A friend of mine was reassigned to a new team a couple months ago. She's not meshing well with this team or their work, so she resolved to bring this up with her boss. The boss agreed to move her to a new assignment, but said there would be a bit of downtime as they find a new assignment for her.
But now, just this morning, she was getting ready to go to work and her boss texted her and instructed her to use PTO instead of coming in today, as they don't have any assignment for her just yet. This is a bit stressful for her, as she has a planned vacation coming up, and the change in assignment is eating at her PTO hours.
She said it's OK, though, because the company lets her go into negative PTO hours. But when she quits, she'll have to pay all those hours back. She's not allowed to use unpaid time off.
To me this all sounds extremely suspect and unusual for a full time employee. For context- she works in construction management in Hawaii, full time, hourly, not salaried. I can't imagine how that'll look on her taxes or whether she'll be tax refunded for hours she has to pay back in PTO when she quits.
And we need some salient advice from people with experience in these kinds of systems. Not looking for hate-training, please, just whether these systems are legal, and what next steps to take if they aren't.