In Illinois, what laws are violated if a company doesn’t pay an hourly employee for the correct amount of time?
A coworker of mine is paid every two weeks, from timesheets that are filled out by him and his superviser and faxed into our company’s payroll department. He’s pretty routinely paid for a different amount of hours than this; the amounts are almost random, and often he’s overpaid, though usually he is underpaid. These are errors in the payroll department, as there’s never a discrepency between scheduled hours and time he spends on the clock. If he contacts payroll to inform them of an error, they attempt to fix it on the next paycheck, though usually these corrections are wrong as well.
For the last three pay periods in a row, he’s not been compensated the correct amount, and though he swears aloud when he opens his check, he calms down and sends a mostly polite email to payroll. This hasn’t worked. I’m convinced that, not only is this bad business, our company is also doing something illegal, and I’m curious personally how our company could be making these errors firstly (that one I don’t think is answerable in GQ), but more importantly, which laws would they be running afowl of? Are licensed medical health professionals covered by the Illinois Minimum Wage Act, which appears to cover most non-farm workers? Or would the IRS be interested in looking at someone’s books? I don’t want anyone sued, I just want my coworker to get paid for the time he’s worked, on time, correctly, every other week. That doesn’t seem hard.
Disclaimer: I am not seeking legal advice, no one on the board is my lawyer, etc.
If this is consistently happening, a lawyer is just what he needs.
Tell him to keep copies of all of his timesheets so he has a record of hours worked, preferably the one signed/authorized by his supervisor that gets sent in. If this does not work, s/he should ask her supervisor to intervene. If s/he refuses, s/he most likely has a boss as well. Ask if the supervisor has a problem with going to supervisors boss if s/he will not or cannot seem to intervene on his behalf.
Is your friend sure s/he is calculating his expected pay properly? Many employers are terrified of the fines that can be handed down for improper payroll handling by labor boards.
What type of work does your co-worker do? I don’t know many hourly employees who could actually afford a lawyer. Especially the ones that don’t get paid properly for their work.
It sound like it’s time for him to move past the e-mail stage. He should write a letter in which he carefully lists pay periods, hours worked, expected compensation and actual pay received. He should then request a detailed explanation of the discrepancies.
This may actually result in a resolution of the problem. If not, it will likely be of help down the road when it can be noted that he formally requested that the problem be addressed.
If he collects up some solid evidence you might find a lawyer willing to rip it out of the employer in punitive damages if there is a history of illegal payroll activity that has continued despite employees asking politely for corrections.
Pick up the phone alot of times you can toss out a nutshell version and see if there is something to pursue. If we are talking $5-10 one way or the other, probably not. Also if this is happening to many employees 5-6 could get to gether to chip in to cover a consultation/retainer if it came to lawsuit time. I have a hard time imagining something like the OP’s scenario consistently occurring on a company of a scale greater than 4-5 employees unless someone is messing with it on purpose or is a very inaccurate on 10key work. Alot of this stuff is just feeding man hours into a program that does all the tax and benefit calculations itself.
I wouldn’t get lawyers involved - it sounds as if he wants to remain an employee. I’d suggest just a polite letter to the manager of the payroll department detailing the problems.
