I suspect you have in mind the 2004 DOL clarification on the FLSA exemption rules and the (then) new salary test with respect to exempt employees. Here are some pertinent links:
(The first set of links are from the Texas Workforce Commission, providing guidance on the federal regulations; it was the first thing I found and should be generally applicable. The second set are from the U.S. Dept of Labor. You could probably find some more pertaining to your state by googling something like “New Jersey Department of Labor overtime” or “New Jersey Wage and Hour Division”.)
Note that it is not illegal to require you to make your missed time, but if they do so, you are not paid a salary but rather a wage denominated in pay periods rather than the usual hourly figure. Because the overtime exemptions require the payment of a true salary, an employee who was expected to make up a shortage hours despite working for a “salary” would also be entitled to time-and-a-half overtime pay.
Gnerally, if you read the job description for a true “manager” (i.e., exempt employee), you’ll see that the job is defined as completing projects, rather than specific tasks. Usually, buried under all those projects is a line like “plus whatever tasks management deems necessary.” Also, on most performance review forms there’s a category like “assists other employees as needed.”
So, even if you get every item on your to-do list checked off in 30 hours or so, management can simply says that a) you haven’t been assigned enough to do and dump more work on you and/or b) you’re going home early instead of pitching in where needed.
In other words, work expands to fill the available time.
I worked in management positions for many years. Generally speaking, my boss in any of those jobs would never question time missed at the office, as long as it was not a habit. One boss even told me that she considered those in management positions to be able to take up to four hours per week away from the job without explanation.
My mom’s a parapro in the public school system and is salaried. They don’t force her to work, but she does get docked. Being late only means she doesn’t get paid for the jobs that are time sensitive in the morning. But leaving early, even only an hour, get her docked a half day. And, of course, they can fire her, except nobody really wants her job. (That’s a pretty bad job in a market like this.)
I am an exempt salaried guy and the way we work it is that I am expected to get all of my work done no matter what time it takes. I am also expected to work 8 hours each working day at the office and if I don’t, I need to make it up by the end of the monthly pay period. Likewise, if I work at the office more than 8 hours, I can take that time off sometime during the month. As long as my official time-sheet balance ends up being zero at the end of the pay period.
My employers say that even though I am salaried, I got to keep an offical time sheet and the accountants get pissed off if my hours are not at zero because of some sort of occasional audit they have to go through.
Keep in mind these are offical office hours, most of the managers where I work do a lot of work at home. Not that we are forced or even expected to work at home, but they give us all the tools necessary to do it almost as a favor so we are not stuck at the office all day.
I appreciate all the answers—a lot of these seem to fall into the category of ‘how things actually work at my job’, as opposed to whether or not that’s the way they’re supposed to work. (For the record, this is purely hypothetical—I’m an exempt employee, and things work like you’d expect here: most weeks I’m over 40 hours, but occassionally things do happen that cause me to be late or leave early. No one has actually insisted that make up the time, but I was just curious about the legality should it come up some day.)
It does strike me as ridiculous to make someone stay and make up a missing hour if all the work that needs doing is actually done, since you’re paying me the same either way. Especially given that the week before, you probably got more than 40 hours out of me.