No, don’t. *HR is not your friend. *
Yup! Sounds like favoritism.
That doesn’t make it illegal. Just kind of crappy.
Have you bothered to ask anyone? The employee? The boss? Your supervisor? If not, why not, if it’s making you so hot.
And he’s working the same hours, they are just configured differently!
Has it occured to you that the reason he needs this accommodation is both none of your business (something to do with his health? The health of a loved one? Some other exceedingly private thing?), and possibly something quite tragic?
You’re not going to look too good, stomping your foot for the same accommodation, when you’re NOT visiting your dying brother, or going for some kind of medical treatment. Proceed carefully.
Nope. We have many hourly employees at our work place. Some get paid more than others, some come and go at different hours, some get parking and some get a bus pass. We negotiate each one separately, depending on what they want and how much we want them to be happy. It’s pretty arbitrary. If someone complained about what they were getting, we would evaluate what they want and what we can offer. We would not be interested in comparing their package to other employees.
It seems like he would have the worse deal in terms of workload. If you really have to cover for him when he leaves early, then I assume he has to cover your work when you’re at lunch. While you 4 are at lunch, he has to do 400% more work. When he leaves early, each of you have to do 20% more work. It doesn’t seem like anyone is getting away with anything.
I didn’t see any graphs. Where were the graphs?
Graphs? What about the TPS reports?
Please don’t take this the wrong way, I mean no offense, but is this one of your first jobs? The situation you describe is very, very common where different employees work different schedules. You will be a lot happier and a lot more successful if you focus on your own work and be a great employee. If your coworker is cutting out early and not doing his work, it will eventually get noticed and dealt with. And if you keep plugging along and do good work, that will get noticed as well. Your employer will realize that you can get the job done and give you promotions and raises. And if not, you’re better off finding another job where the environment suits you better.
Things are rarely fair in the workplace. People get paid different amounts and are assigned different amounts of work. It’s just the way it is. If you get overly wrapped up on perceived inequalities, you won’t be happy because there will always be someone who is paid more or does less work than you do.
And you and your co-workers workload is falling on him during that 30 minutes you’re eating your lunch and he’s working.
It may be favoritism, but as has been stated above it does not appear to be illegal in Pennsylvania. Or it may not be favoritism as such, there may be a compelling need for his different schedule, and it may be none of your business what the reason is no matter how much it bugs you.
Says who? You? You and your co-workers don’t get to decide this stuff – you don’t own the company. There may be a really good reason for his getting a different schedule. If you can’t stand the situation you are free to leave and work somewhere else.
So what? Being at work – that is, being at the workplace – isn’t what pay is based on in most cases. The pay is based on doing work. It appears everyone is doing work for 8 hours and is paid for 8 hours. While you obviously don’t like having a mandatory one-hour lunchtime, don’t conflate the time at the workplace with the time spent actually working. It’s not the same thing, and it doesn’t make you look too bright to act like it is.
It appears your question as to whether the situation is legal where you are has been answered. We can only guess as to why the difference that bothers you exists – there’s no way for us to know the reason behind it. If you just want to piss and moan that your workday, including lunch, is 9 hours instead of 8½ hours, I fear you won’t get much sympathy here. We can’t explain it and we can’t do anything about it.
Hypothetical protected class issue.
Suppose he leaves early to pick up kids and none of the other workers have families. Would it still be legal if family status is a protected class? That is assuming a non-famial worker asks for the same schedule.
Does this person have seniority? If so, then it’s possible that her schedule was grandfathered in.
My advice? Let it alone. Nobody ever said that the world was fair. If you think about it long enough, you’ll find reasons to be pissed off at the world. For instance, in my job:
The co-worker in my group who has the most seniority gets paid about 40% more than most of us because she was hired before they downgraded the pay curve for our level. She gets about double what I get in profit sharing because they also reduced the percentage after she was hired but before I was hired. Plus she gets, count 'em, SIX WEEKS of paid vacation. Guess who gets to cover for her when she is gone?
Another co-worker is “location free” and actually lives not just in another state, but across the country from the rest of us. We were recently told that we could no longer work from home more than 1 day per week (they used to REQUIRE us to work from home 2 days per week because we were out of office space)…except that the location-free chick still gets to work from home 5 days per week.
Another co-worker takes an extended smoke break 2 times per day. Still another leaves for hours on end (he thinks that we don’t see him leave because he walks out the side door) and no one knows where he goes. Our manager isn’t around enough to notice.
Another “works” from 8am-5pm religiously, except his work is so error-riddled that the senior co-worker now has to “approve” all of his work.
Another is so slow that she’s always given the easy tasks. And, ironically, she was just promoted to my level because she successfully argued that she’s doing the same work as everyone else. Technically true, but not actually true. So now SHE’s going to be making about 40% more than me, because she was also hired before the pay curve was downgraded.
Oh well! No skin off of my back. I do my job the best I can, try to be as efficient as possible, and try to get along with everyone. What everyone else does is out of my control.
The Op keeps saying 2.5 hours and he means per week not per day.
Question: for what company do you work?
As for “I am at work for 9 hours and get paid for 8; he is at work for 8.5 hours and gets paid for 8”, is there something stopping you from going out during your lunch period? It’s not as if you are expected to work during your break, or even part of it; if you are, then your employer is almost certainly breaking the law.
Fair enuf.
Is the employee with the differing hours a long-term employee who may have been grandfathered into the schedule due to his tenure on the job?
Are you in a bargaining unit (union) environment? If so, I would take this question to your union rep who might be able to give you an answer. HR will not, even if they know, because someone else’s working schedule is not considered your business. You will do yourself no favor in asking them (and I’m in HR). You will just gain a reputatio as a malcontent.
Do you have a reasonable relationship with your supervisor, that you could ask just as a point of conversation? Something along the lines of “I’ve always wondered why Joe works a different schedule.” A supervisor might think it’s a reasonable question and give you some kind of an answer.
Otherwise, as long as the employee is not taking advantage of his status (such as taking an hour lunch but still leaving early), unfortunately you are probably just going to have to grin and bear it.
If “families” were a protected class by law, then you may have a case for discrimination. You may not as well. To violate the law, an employer would have to deliberately and systematically be judged to have willfully violated the law.
That is a tough burden to demonstrate.
Usually familial status is “protected” as an offshoot of the “Pregnancy Discrimination Act” or via sex discrimination, in other words the employer only asks and modifies females with families. While not protected federally, it may be worth checking your state and/or city laws and ordinances to see what, if any protections are given.
I do understand the OP problem and view quite well. I deal with an non-profit and we help people get off public aid. One of the things I find my clients will find is the type of jobs they usually get placed into have awful schedules.
One of the biggest beefs is split schedules. My clients may have times where they work three hours are off three hours and back on four hours. Often they live so far that even with a three hour break it would make no sense to ride public transit back home, only to turn around again.
So it “feels” like they are at work ten hours and getting paid for seven. Even though they are only actually working seven. Not exactly what the OP is describing but similar.
I recently started working a different schedule from my peers. I go in an hour later and stay an hour later. We all work the same 40 hours per week. This was done to allow me to be there for late appointment people and to return phone calls that stack up during the day. Sometimes varying schedules work for reasons that aren’t explained to the whole staff. If that person doesn’t answer to you, I’d say it’s nunya.
One thing that has not been brought up. The job interview when you and your fellow employees were first hired.
When offered the job he may have only accepted the position on the condition of only having a 30 minute lunch.
Check your employee hand book. That is all I have to say without getting snarky.