I live and work in Ohio. I’m taking an unpaid vacation (leave of absence?) for the week of January 17th, which is a holiday for my company, and resuming work the next week. I should have scheduled my vacation to start on the 18th, but I didn’t think about it and now I regret it.
Will I get paid for the day of January 17th? Is there a law which requires my employer to pay me for holidays as long as I am an employee on the payroll?
Since companies decided themselves which days are holidays and which are not, regardless of Federal status, I would think this is a matter of company policy, not Federal or State law. I can’t imagine a law that dictates when a private company must pay for specific vacation days, but I’m certainly not an employment lawyer.
It is not a matter of law, it is a matter of your company policy.
As an example, a company I worked for has a policy that says that to be paid for a company holiday, you must have chargeable hours the last working day before the holiday and the first working day after the holiday. Chargeable hours are basically any hours that you can be paid for. Therefore, someone whose first day on the job is the day after the holiday, and someone who terminates employment the day before the holiday are not entitled to be paid for the holiday. Someone in your situation could not be paid for the holiday,
Call HR, they will resolve it a lot faster than we Dopers can!
Your company is a cheapskate, then. Usually it’s worded such that unpaid absenses surrounding a holiday result in the holiday not getting paid. It’s around one day holidays that many, many people schedule their vacations to get an extra day out of it. So in your company, for example, if you take the Mon-Tue-Wed before Thanksgiving (assuming you’re in the USA) off, you won’t get paid for Thu and Fri?
Not necessarily, vacation time may be “chargable hours”. I was initially thinking billable hours, but I suspect vacation time is indeed charged against some account.
Upon re-reading your note, this wouldn’t work if the time taken is unpaid. I’ve never worked in a place where people took unpaid leave, it’s pretty much always vacation time, which would likely be OK under this scheme.
If you are in fact on unpaid leave, I don’t see why you’d get paid for a holiday. If you are on vacation I can understand it. Unpaid, however, is unpaid.
Feel lucky you don’t work in India. My relatives there tell me that in most professional positions, if you take a vacation day adjacent to a weekend, then the weekend days are counted as vacations. For example, if you normally get Saturday and Sunday off and you take vacation days on Friday and Monday, then you’re charged with four vacation days.
Boy am I happy to live in a country where everybody gets paid by the month and vacation is always paid! You can’t get unpaid vacation, but there are enough vacation days that you shouldn’t need to; you can get unpaid leave but the procedures are different and you can’t just decide you want to take a few unpaid days off.
There’s bonuses you get for working overtime or on a national/provincial holiday (including sundays), but basically the only people who get paid by the hour/word are self-employed.
The worst part about working in the US for a year was going from 45 vacation days (includes holidays) to 11 days (does not include holidays but you guys really need more of those).
I can’t imagine that an HR department would be so nasty as to pull a “gotcha” like not paying you for MLK day just because you asked for the week off without thinking about the otherwise paid holiday.
Talk to them. Whoever processes such matters probably just automatically fixed it for you–otherwise, they’d have to create a special category in the accounts just for you, the only person payable yet not paid for MLK day which would only complicate things for them–unlikley unless they are truly evil.
Hope it works out for you.
Might not have made a difference if your unpaid leave started on the 18. The policy at every job I’ve had was that you had to be paid for both the day before and the day after the holiday to be paid for the holiday.
I think that’s different from what the OP is describing. You probably mean if someone takes vacation days for the Mon., Tues.,. and Wed. of Thanksgiving week - then I imagine they’d also get paid for Friday. The OP is talking about taking unpaid time off.
In my experience, it’s a fairly common rule that a company requires someone to be scheduled and paid before and/or after a holiday in order to receive pay for the holiday itself.
I’ll clarify what I meant – if you’re on normal vacation before or after a holiday, and you would otherwise get paid for the holiday, then I think most companies would ordinarily pay you for the holiday. The rule against getting paid on a holiday is normally meant to disuade hourly workers (my meaning of this is unskilled, lower class, not so bright, don’t really care about their job, etc.) from making their own long weekend. Let’s take Thanksgiving again. If Mon., Tue., and Wed. are workdays, you better show up for work or be on vacation or otherwise properly excused from work on Wedneday and Monday (or Friday if it’s not a holiday for you), otherwise you won’t get paid for the Thursday and Friday (if Friday is a holiday for you – seems that for a good number of people it’s not!).
In the Army, leave (paid vacation) always included weekends if your leave spanned a weekend. It didn’t include holidays if they were recognized holidays.
Are you sure you mean “properly excused from work”, and not “paid”? Because i know that if I take an approved six month unpaid leave, I won’t be getting paid for all of the holidays that fall in those six months. And the same policy applies if I take a one week unpaid leave with a holiday in it.
That might be part of the reason, in some places ( not where I work, though), But another part of the reason is to avoid paying the person who started work on January 2, or the person who retired whose last day worked was in October, but whose last day on payroll was the day before Thanksgiving due to accumulatd leave time.
I don’t think there are any national holidays in America. The closest thing would be a federal holiday.
I work in HR and more specifically, I process leaves of absence for a company of about 30,000 employees (U.S.).
According to our company policy, if you are on paid vacation, you would get paid for the holiday and charge the rest of your time off to vacation days.
If you are on a paid leave of absence (for example, medical leave), you don’t get paid for the holiday. But hey, you’re already getting disability pay for that day anyway.
If you are on an unpaid leave of absence, you do not receive pay for any holidays that occur during your leave.
Right now there is no policy in our company that you have to have chargeable time before and after a holiday, but they are thinking about implementing one.
= paid hours of any kind
I still say call HR of your own company, cuz they’re the only ones that can answer your question.