Human Resource Blog

Sick leave for salary paid employees. Time clock and overtime Florida

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If I am salary employee and i come to work and punch in but after an hour or two of work leaves because they are ill is is legal for the employer to dedust sick hours for the time they were not here? Example: I am salary entered work at 8:00am and left at 10:00am. My employer has paid me for the full day but only 2 hours regular and 6 hours sick time.

Also is it the law to have salary employees punch in and out the time clock?

I do not supervise any employee and i also do not get paid over time. Is this against the law?

I am from NY and have had seven staff members to supervise it seems like either the laws are not being followed or Florida state has different laws concerning salary employees.

When a salaried exempt employee works a few hours and then goes home, it is important that the employee be paid for the entire day. How the employer tabulates that time, is not important. If the employer wants to count it as 6 hours of sick time and 2 hours of work time, that’s fine. Some employers would simply pay the employee his or her usual salary and not deduct any sick time. But, there is no law requiring the employer to do so.

If the employer in this case paid the worker only for a partial day, that would potentially endanger the employee’s salaried exempt status. Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act or FLSA, an employee whose pay is docked for working partial days, is entitled to overtime when working more than 40 hours per week. However, in this case the employee’s pay is not docked. He is being paid his full salary.

Here’s one way to look at it. Suppose Suzie’s employer very generously gives workers 80 hours of sick leave each year. Suzie is a salaried exempt employee who has gone home sick 13 times in the past 60 days. Each time, Suzie worked 2 hours before going home. Should Suzie be entitled to an additional 10 paid sick days in the next 30 days? That would mean that she was away from work a total of 23 days in 90 days. Most employers would say “no.” Suzie has used about 78 hours of sick time already, and only has 2 hours left.

The FLSA also requires employers to keep accurate records of the hours that employees work, whether those employees are hourly or salaried. One way that many employers choose to do this is to have both salaried and hourly employees punch a time clock. There is nothing illegal about this, as long as the salaried exempt employee’s pay isn’t docked when he works less than 40 hours in the week.

There is not enough information to determine if this employee should genuinely be classified as salaried exempt or salaried non-exempt. The FLSA exempts employees from overtime requirements based on their primary job duties. Some of the exemptions are for executives, administrators, professionals and outside sales people. A number of articles in the archive discuss these exemptions. If you read them, and still have doubts, feel free to post another question.

Employment laws are established by both federal and state governments, so some laws in Florida will be different from those in New York.

Here’s some free advice that the employee didn’t ask for, but we’re going to give, anyway. Frequently Northern transplants to Florida assume that the way things were done in their home state is the one and only “correct” way, and the way things are done in the South is “wrong.”  (New Yorkers are especially famous for this attitude.) This employee will be much happier in the sunny South if he or she realizes that sometimes things can be different without being “wrong.”