How do companies pay salaried, exempt employees when snowstorms force them to shut down operations?
To remain exempt, employees must be paid on a “salary basis” — they get the same amount of money every week, in most cases, no matter how many hours they work.
You can deduct from workers’ salaries in whole-day increments when an employee chooses to be absent for personal reasons. So if your office is open, but an employee can’t make it due to the weather, you can deduct from his PTO bank or from his weekly salary.
But what about when the weather’s so bad, you shut down the office for a day or longer?
If it’s anything less than a week, you have to pay exempt employees their full salaries, according to an Opinion Letter from the Department of Labor.
You still have the option of making employees use vacation time to cover the work they’re missing. But when employees have no accrued PTO, they’re still owed a full week’s salary.
Half days
You can also deduct PTO when an employee misses a partial day — by choice or because of a workplace closing.
But again — even when an employee takes a half-day by choice, you can only deduct from his salary in full-day increments. So even if he has no PTO, he still gets paid for the whole day if he does any work at all.
