Human Resource Blog

Hourly Employees

I live in Georgia, and my company was closed Thanksgiving day and the day after, which was Friday. We have hourly and salary employees at my organization. The hourly employees got paid for Thursday, Thanksgiving day, if they worked the day before (Wednesday) and the next business day ( Monday.) Two of my employees came to me and said by law they should have been paid for Friday as well since the company decided they were going to be closed on Friday. Their argument was that if salary employees weren’t docked for not working on Friday, then hourly workers shouldn’t either. Obviously, hourly employees cannot be compared to salary, but this seems to be a bit of a gray area. Please excuse me if this question seems a little elementary, I am new to human resources. Thanks!!

There are many grey areas in Human Resources, but this is not one of them.

Here is the explaination we suggest that you give your hourly employees: Every employer has the right to treat hourly and salaried employees differently — in fact, they are required by law to do so, in many cases. If your hourly employees disagree, point out that they are paid overtime when they work more than 40 hours per week, by law, while your salaried (exempt) employees are not entitled to overtime. In this case, federal law requires that salaried (exempt) employees be paid for the day your company was closed. There is no requirement under state or federal law that hourly employees must be paid when the company is closed.

More details, for you: Under federal and Georgia law, employers must pay hourly workers for each hour worked. There is no obligation for employers to pay hourly workers for time that they do not work, including holidays. Offering paid holidays is strictly optional. So the company is being generous by offering paid holidays to hourly workers. If the employer does offer paid holidays to hourly workers, the employer can set whatever policies they like regarding those holidays, as long as the employer applies them fairly to all hourly employees. For example, if you paid African American hourly employees for holidays, and not Caucasian hourly employees, that would be illegal discrimination.

However, under the federal FLSA or Fair Labor Standards Act, salaried exempt employees must be paid for any day that they are ready, willing and able to work, even if no work is available. This is the situation with a salaried exempt employee who worked Wednesday, was off Thursday and Friday, and worked Monday. The employee was available to work, but there was no work available because the company was closed. So by law, you must pay the salaried workers for Thursday and Friday.

If you wanted to, you could legally pay the hourly workers only for the time they actually worked that week, and not offer any paid holidays.

Emily, please feel free to post any questions that you may have. We know HR can be confusing at first — we have all been there!