I'm an exempt employee in a company that provides sick time, personal time and vacation pay (all seperately). If I come in late on a day (still work 6.9 hours that day) in a work week that still totals over 50 hours (salary based on 40) can my employee deduct 1.1 personal hours for the 1.1 I missed that day? They're saying I missed scheduled time but in actuality 2 of the 6.9 hours was worked after 5PM (my scheduled day). I know employees don't have to provide personal time but does doing so bind them to any protocol? I'm trying to make sense of all this simply because I see no benefit to being exempt if the company provides "reasonable PTO". It seems simply like a way for companies to get around paying their highest paid employees overtime. I get the same amount of personal time, sick time, and vacation time as any other lower paid employee who has been with the company as long as myself yet I'm expected to work vast amounts of OT (50-60 hours is normal, including Saturdays at times) without being paid for it. This just doesn't seem fair. What am I misunderstanding?

The law's only concern is that you receive your same salary every week in which you do any work (with limited exceptions). The law doesn't care what bucket any of that time comes from. So yes, it is legal (although I would have to agree that in most cases it is petty) for an employer to dock your vacation, sick or personal time when you miss scheduled time, regardless of how many hours you work.

I would venture to guess that what you are missing is that being exempt does not mean that you get to come and go as you please. It is still the right of the employer to set the working hours for the employees, regardless of the exempt status.

The benefit of being exempt is that the actual dollars you receive each pay period cannot be docked no matter how few or how many hours you work, except in very limited, highly regulated circumstances.

This too leads me to one further question about the very limited and highly regulated circumstances I can be docked. Please correct me if I'm misinterpreting the law, which I'm sure I am. My understanding is this concerning exempt employees:

1) if a company doesn't provide a written sick/personal time policy in RI then you cannot be docked that week if you work at least one hour in a forty hour work week. Of course you could be reasonably suspended or fired, I understand that.

2) if a company does provide a "reasonable" sick/personal time policy then when that time is used up the company can dock you if you use up your sick/personal time.

So what is reasonable (6 days in our company)? and if a sick time policy is provided for, then what separates exempt from non-exempt employees if they both used thier hours up in the course of a year, except the lack of overtime pay for the exempt employee? Such circumstances don't seem very limiting. It seems quite easy for a company to treat exempt employees no differently than non-exempt employees simply by providing an allowance for sick time and gain the advantage of not paying overtime to thier highest paid employees while still expecting substantial overtime work from them.

I've been exempt for quite few years now so having personal time taken in such instances isn't new to me (and I have more than enough to spare) but it, as you can probably tell, really burns me up that I can put in 52 hours in a week and still have 1.1 of personal taken from me. I always wanted get to the bottom of it and last week prompted me to do so.