So we have Annualised hours working in our company. Set number of hours to work in a financial year. Extra money paid for weekend working and the number of weekend hours is set at the start of the year. All shifts are in a rolling pattern of Earlies, Lates and nights and most importantly the shifts are published a year in advance. So you know 365 days ahead what your working pattern is. So far so good.
So if any employee has to work 500 weekend hours it is on a set pattern. But of there is a 3 week training course organised then set pattern changes to suit the training course. As training providers do not work weekends the employee will have missed out on weekend working within his pattern of shifts as he was training elsewhere Mon to Fri.
As a solution company says we will continue to pay you as if you worked those missed weekends as it was not your fault that we asked you to go on training. Great so far.
Now here is the question. Employee gets paid for those 3 sets of weekend hours as if he has worked it. Should he also be credited with those extra weekend hours in his total sheet. Because if it transpires that later in the year he is asked to work extra weekends to complete an order, his weekend tally will go above the 500 hrs mark. That will attract extra payment as he has crossed the threshold of 500 hrs.
Isnt this a double benefit he gets. Not working the weekend when getting trained but it adds to the tally sheet and helps him cross the line later in the year for extra payments. Is it unreasonable to say we will not deduct your pay for the training but wont add the hrs to your total. Isnt that a sensible approach so that both sides are happy.
I’ll start off by saying I don’t think it’s unreasonable. I also think it’s getting to the point of being a huge pain in the ass for whoever is in charge of running this. How many hours are we talking about missing over those 3 weeks? 5? 10? It’s like 1 or 2% of your total. How likely is it that this happens? Could you just chalk it up to “what goes around will come around” and ignore that sometimes somebody will get a few extra bucks?
Tell your company that if the workers have to work weekends, the company trainers can damn well work weekends too, for the 3 weeks of a training course.
Just because these trainers sit in the front office and only work 9-to-5 usually, doesn’t mean they can disrupt the lives of the employees who actually produce the products that sell & bring in the income for the company.
As you describe this effort to make the employees whole, it’s not a doubling of benefit. They’re being pulled off their regular weekend rotation, so if they aren’t credited with the hours on the tally as a weekend worked, they would be shorted at the end of the year for those same weekend hours missed when it comes to any benefit for excess 500 hrs. worked. This is not double dipping, they are merely breaking even.
The company however, will be paying out slightly more for the extra employees forced off weekends to attend the training.
Just to get an idea of perspective… so, employees are expected to work a set number of hours a year, of which 500 are weekend hours?
So how many hours total do they have to work each year?
And do they get paid more for work on weekends than week days? Because I don’t see why it shouldn’t be enough to just say “okay, we’ll deduct the hours from your 500 total needed for the weekend, but you still need to make X total hours, for which we will credit you (however many) from the time you spent in training, and for which you will also be paid for.”
That is, if the employees’ training time is counted in addition to the other hours, then it’s additional. If the employees’ time is being counted as if they’d worked the weekends, but instead of working those hours in three weekends they’ve worked them during training, it’s substitutive. In the second case, which is what I’m understanding from the OP, their pay will be the same as if they’d worked the three weekends. The amount of total time and therefore the pay are the same, all that’s changed is the actual time when the work took place.
I used to work annualised hours and while the exact way to calculate traded or comped hours was different from company to company, in general the idea was to recover/compensate any hours that you worked outside of your usual pattern ASAP; within the same month if possible.