I feel like this should be illegal, just at a gut level, but I can't find any way to fight this. My husband is a lecturer at a university. He is under a contract that says he will teach 5 courses per year. He has been involuntarily signed up for extra (paid) classes every semester, which is in itself an issue, but not the point. These extra classes are not paid for at all until the end of the school year- not the semester. So he teaches an extra class in fall and another in spring, and doesn't see a dime of it for either until May when he is paid in a lump sum.
That's already frustrating, but to make matters worse, that puts the money into the following year's taxes. This matters because the money is paid in a lump sum and therefore counts as a “bonus” which means they withhold 50% for taxes. You can get it back when you file your taxes, but that isn't until the following April. (E.g. teach fall 2021, get paid for it May 2022 at 50% then get the extra taxes back in April 2023.)
To me, this is withholding pay. However, per the school, he is contracted for five classes per year, so until he has completed five full classes it's still just within the scope of his agreed annual salary. So if he's signed up for four classes in fall (it's normally 3 fall and 2 spring) that four just counts from his 5 total. It makes some level of legal sense, except that if he did teach all five at once in fall the school wouldn't excuse him from teaching the next semester, so there's some implied understanding that the class is an overage even though it's within the scope of his normal contracted work.
Does anyone here have any thoughts about how this could be addressed? The only it thing I could think of is having him try to teach just one class in spring saying he had taught his four already, but I think he would be fired. And universities have all kinds of exclusions from labor laws. TIA!