My gf has been working in a state operated hospital for over 3 years. She’s worked a few positions as she’s been promoted within multiple departments, most recently about 2 years ago. After her training she was initially put on the evening shift and paid the evening shift differential. She was subsequently moved to a mid shift which had not been previously occupied. Without any formal notice she was confirmed by most of her coworkers that since the majority of her shift fell in the evening shift, she should still be receiving the evening pay so she didn’t look into it and noticed no change in her checks. This turned out to be false info since the evening differential didn’t begin until 5pm.
Fast forward 16 months and she has now received a written notice that she’s been overpaid all this time of a sum close to 5k. Along with this are a few options of re-payment: pay full amount, withdrawal from subsequent paychecks no less than 10% of owed value (~$500), deduct sufficient balance from vacation/sick time with any excess owed to be paid separately. This error accounts for 10% of her annual salary and to demand it be paid back within 10 paychecks is abhorrent. I will be able to cover her financially during this time but it will undoubtably put us into a hardship.
As of now she feels like she has no other option than to burn all her sick/vacation time and immediately resign. Luckily we work in a city and a job market where her expertise is in high demand. Other than to purely vent our frustrations, I wanted to make this post to see if anyone has any advice or has experienced something similar.
She plans on not being shy about the reasons for her departure which was by no means her intention and will be a surprise to many. We’ve found that within her union contract regarding overpayment recovery, the employer can’t demand more than 5% of the employees gross income in a pay period. So she at least plans to grieve this to buy some time, but it doesn’t look like we can avoid the inevitable.