OK I work for a contracting company out of a cable comapny in NJ. I had a day where I was sick and did a no call no show to my job for one day, in response to this my supervisior is now deducting wages out of my pay check cause of this. is this legal.

If you are a non-exempt employee, yes it's legal.

To follow up on Betty's answer, I am pretty sure she is assuming that your employer is not paying you for the day not worked. That is normally legal for Non-Exempt employees. There are possible exceptions such a Fluctuating Workweek or Belo Plan. These are oddball excpetions not commonly used, but I could maybe see a cable company going through the bother of these plans for their installers. If you are paid the normal 150% OT for hours worked past 40 in the workweek, then these exceptions do not apply to you. If however you are paid via "funny" OT rules, then you might have restrictions on docking your salary.

If you instead are talking about some type of fine over and beyond the time not worked for the NC/NS, then that is probably not legal.

Past that, if you are Exempt Salaried (unlikely based on your job duties), the legal docking of a day not worked for sick purposes is not impossible, just unlikely.

they are not paying me for the day and in addition to they are backcharging me 150$

Not paying for you for the day (assuming that you are Non-Exempt) is probably legal, but charging you an additional $150 is probably illegal.

If you signed any contracts or paperwork related to compensation, you might want to read them. Sometimes the issue is not so much what is done, but how it is done.

Let's say that Jan and Dean both sell widgets for different companies. Jan gets paid minimum wage plus a conditional bonus. Dean gets paid a larger salary but has one of those $150 forfeitures you mention. Jan and Dean work exactly the same hours this week and get paid exactly the same money. Jan is probably treated legally and Dean is probably treated illegally.

It is legally difficult to unring a bell. If an employee making $XX.XX per hour works yy hours, it is legally very difficult for the employer to not pay the full wages due. On the other hand, smart employers can up front write compensation argreements that do pretty much the same thing, but put part of total comensation into conditional bonus payments. I worked for a manufacturing company in CA in the 1980s. All factory workers got paid an additonal $100 per month for any month that they had perfect attendance. Perfectly legal. It could have been legal if we had a slightly different compensation package that had different rates depending on measurably means of performance as long as this was spelled out prior to work being done and assuming that CA-DLSE considered the measuring points objective and reasonable.

Your sort of question is often very detail specific.

The only contracts I signed when i started was that if i lost equipment i would have to pay for it (aka I lost a wrench I would have to pay the $5.00 for it, but if it broke the company would pay for it.) the company would jsut take it out of my pay check and they would replace the tool or piece of equipment. Also if I did any major damages to some ones property and didnt tell anyone (aka drilled 12 holes in someones house and then tried to hide it) they would charge me what it would cost to fix that. No where did I sign anything saying they could take money out of my pay check if I was late or for any other things other then discribed above.

Then the action of deducting of deducting $150 as a penalty for NS/NC is probably illegal. I am saying "probably" because I do not know what your employer will say should they need to say something, and because the people who make any final decisions (your state's DOL) do not care about anyone's opinion but their own. But if you can get your employer to support your version of the facts (which they probably will not), then they are in a bad place legally. Of course, I would not be very surprised if employers who take illegal deductions from their employee's paychecks will also lie about why they did it.

File a wage claim. It works or it does not.

Well then ill wait till they do it then, since they put it in writing and place it in our paychecks why they deduct things, so when that happens ill have prof and can go from there thats if it wasnt just a rues.

To follow up on Betty's answer, I am pretty sure she is assuming that your employer is not paying you for the day not worked


DAW, yes, that is what I assumed OP meant - that he got docked for the day not worked. I didn't think of an additional penalty - glad you did.