I am a salary employee (and being on call using my own cell phone with no reimbursement for time spent or cell phone bill reimbursement) of a call answering service call center. I started this position in March and my vacation time has not started. So, now for the dilemma. I recently had surgery where I was out for three weeks. Before I had the surgery I was told I had to make-up the hours missed. Not a problem BUT I have had to take some extra time off for one day being ill and enrolling a child into a new school. Since I have been back to work , I have been working 18 hours each week over to make up for the time lost. Apparently, this was not good enough as the employer notified me via letter attached to a recent check that a deduction of one week pay equal to 40 hours was being deducted to go towards hours owed. Not sure if this is legal or ethical but sure do feel shafted by this employer. Any recourse??

"Salary" is just a payment method and legally does not mean much by itself. Exempt salaried employees work under one set of rules (29 CFR 541.602), and Non-Exempt salaried employees actually have three different possible payment methods, although one of these methods (29 CFR 778.113) is in much more common use then the others. So the starting point is to find out your Exempt status. For this we would need to know the nature of your employer's business and exactly what your job duties are.

I looked up my status and it states I am EXEMPT. The management type position I am in is of supervisor/coordinator/trainer/on-call supervisor. I am not paid overtime. The nature of the business I stated in my original post, it is a call-answering service call center. So which set up rules would apply?

Assuming that you are really Exempt (and your employer saying that you are Exempt by itself does not make it so), then:
- There are two states in the country that as a function of labor law require expense reimbursement. TX is not one of those two states. It is possible that court action could work but not certain.
- There are also maybe two states that has general restrictions on hours to be worked. TX is also not one of those states. Generally speaking, most employers can make most employees work pretty much any hours the employer wishes. It is not specifically against the law for the employer (for example) to make you work 100 hour weeks.
- There is no legal right for an Exempt Salaried employee to paid overtime. Legally the "make up" time does not have to paid or treated as "make up" since the employer could have had you work pretty much unlimited unpaid overtime anytime.
- Docking the salary of an Exempt Salaried employee however is legally interesting. The following is the related federal regulation, which does indeed place some restrictions on the docking. Just to be clear, the federal rules look at the payment of the actual salary, period. Nothing involving vacation/sick/PTO time has any legal affect on federal law.

You need to read the entire regulation, but basically it is always legal for the employer to not pay for entire work week missed. Additionally there is a FMLA provision that could be applicable.
Exempt Salaried docking rules. (http://www.dol.gov/dol/allcfr/ESA/Title_29/Part_541/29CFR541.602.htm)