This is the time of year when my in-box gets flooded with questions about how companies can and can’t handle time off around the holidays. Here are answers to some of the questions I receive most commonly.
1. My company is closed around Christmas and making me use PTO or take the time unpaid. Can they do that?
They can indeed require that you use vacation time for that period, even if you don’t want to.
As for making you take the time without pay: If you’re non-exempt, they don’t need to pay you for time you didn’t work, so yes, this would be legal. But if you’re exempt, they’d need to pay you; the law is clear that exempt employees can’t have their salaries docked “for absences occasioned by the employer or by the operating requirements of the business.” (The exception: if you’re not working for a full week, they can dock that.)
Either way, though, it’s not a great move, outside of industries where this is such a common practice that everyone knows to expect and plan for it.
2. I have to work on Christmas and New Year’s. Can they make me do that without extra pay or giving me a comp day?
Yes. No law requires extra compensation for working on holidays. However, if it’s normally a holiday for your company, you might ask about taking the holiday on a different day instead.
3. I arranged to take a vacation day the day after Thanksgiving. My office ended up closing at 1 p.m. that day and letting people go home early. But I’m still being charged a full vacation day. Shouldn’t they just deduct half a day of vacation?
Different employers handle this differently. Some will do what yours did; others will just charge a half day of vacation. For employers who do charge the full amount, the argument is that there’s benefit to being able to have a guaranteed full day off that you can plan on in advance, whereas the employees who came to work that day didn’t have that.
4. I’m an exempt employee, and my employer is closed down for two weeks over the holidays. If I’m expected to work a day or two during that time, am I entitled to either receive comp time or additional pay for the hours I work? These two weeks are paid staff holidays for all full-time employees.
Legally, there’s no requirement for that. But you could certainly approach your manager and say, “I’m missing out on two days of holiday pay that everyone else is getting since I’ll be working those days. Is it possible for me to take those two days in January (or later) instead?”