If an employee's normal work week is a 10-hour day, 4-day work week, and they are being paid for a holiday (i.e., Memorial Day), on which they would have normally worked 10 hours, is their holiday pay 10 hours (their normal shift), or 8 hours, the holiday pay which other employees receive, who work a regular 8-hour, 5-day work week?
This is a question that comes up a lot now as employers become more and more flexible about scheduling. The answer is really a matter of company policy. Generally, most employers consider a paid holiday to be the equivalent of an 8 hour day and compensate employees accordingly. For nonexempt employees, this means they receive 8 hours of holiday pay. The key from a policy perspective is to be consistent and it is helpful if employees perceive the policy as being fair for everyone.
For a nonexempt employee, the employer could let the employee know that he or she will receive 8 hours of holiday pay. The employee may make up the 2 additional hours later in the week, take 2 hours of vacation time, or elect to take the 2 hours as unpaid time off.
For an exempt employee, the situation is a little different because employers may not take deductions for partial day absences. Accordingly, employers can let the exempt employee know the holiday time is equivalent to 8 hours, and the employee may either make up the 2 hours or elect to use paid time off such as available vacation time (warning: employers may only charge an employee's paid time off for a partial day absence if there is a written policy that states this will be done).
This methodology would work for most work schedules. For instance, in a situation I'm familiar with, an employee works 4 hours on Monday and 9 hours each day Tuesday through Friday. Since Memorial Day fell on a Monday, the employee had the 4 hours of holiday on Memorial Day and then was permitted to take another 4 hours during the week.
There are a number of ways to handle this situation and employers are relatively free to adopt a policy that works for the company. It is important to make sure the policy is administered in a fair and consistent manner.
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