Located in the United States
At my job, we take turns going on call each weekend. Being on call just involves being available to take calls and provide technical support. We get paid per call taken, in addition to a daily flat-rate for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I have been at this job for two years and I have never received a call while being “on-call”, though I have spent ~90 days on call while I've been here.
My training for being “on-call” was extremely poor. For the first year, I didn't even know that we got paid a flat rate per day. I was only told that we got paid for time spent on calls. At the beginning of the second year, there was an announcement that some of our rates were changing, and it was announced that we would receive $123 (not the actual number) per day while on-call. My understanding at the time was that this was new. I.e. we weren't getting a daily flat-rate previously, but now we are. At no point during my training or the announcement were there any instructions provided on how to report the days spent on-call for our pay stubs. We have a meeting every week where management would document who is going to be on-call, and I believed that this documentation was used to update our paychecks.
I recently discovered that there is a special process that we need to go through in order to report our on-call days in our payroll system in order to get paid for them. This is the first that I have heard of this, and I am currently owed over $8,000 in back-pay for my on-call days.
I spoke with my manager, and he said that he will set up a meeting with HR, but that they would most likely be unable to pay me, though they could offer me some PTO days instead. He also mentioned that all three of the other people in my team had the same issue at some point in time, yet nobody communicated this to me or thought to check with me to see if I was in the same boat. Needless to say, I am not okay with this. Is this legal? My company failed to train me in this process, failed to communicate that it exists, and failed to communicate that we even got paid-per day, and there is a documented history of this being an issue. I'm wondering whether or not this is legal, how hard I should push-back on them, and at what point should I talk to a lawyer?