I am a salaried employee and my company is NOT shutting down the project mananger on my jobsite is working full time and the hourly employees are still working. I was told 2 weeks ago on Monday to not show up to work and that I will not be paid. I do not have enough vacation to cover the time off. I have not been given any paper work to show that I have been laid off and I was told I might be able to go back to work the first week of January. I have emails from the project manager saying " You are one of the highest paid so you have to take the time off unpaid" IS THIS LEGAL IN GEORGIA?

It is legal in all 50 states, presuming that one of the following applies:

1.) You are salaried non-exempt
2.) You are salaried exempt and you are off for more than a full work week

A non-exempt employee, with limited exceptions, does not have to be paid when he does not work. An exempt employee does not have to be paid for any week in which he does not work at all, regardless of the reason.

What if you are only being forced to take only one week off? I am having that situation in Connecticut. I am supposed to do it for the first week of January '09. I will have 4 weeks PAID vacation available to me at that time but am being told to not come to work for a week and I will not be paid.

Probably legal.
- Paying people based on time actual worked is a function of a federal law called FLSA. That was the basis of CBG's earlier answer. Those rules are all in the FLSA regulations. The entire legal definition of "salaried" (for example) is a function of the FLSA law.
- However vacation/PTO is not something that FLSA or federal law cares about. Your state could in theory care about this. Not my state so I guess anything is possible. I can say that I am familiar in a general sense with the vacation/PTO laws in most states. For most states, the law can be summarized as "make the company follow their own policy". These states do not care what the company policy is but will often enforce whatever policy the company came up with. A few states like CA consider vacation legally vested, but even there the employer is not required to let the employee take vacation instead of unpaid leave. I am not saying that it is impossible that CT has the type of rule you are looking for, but it does not seem very likely.

Thanks for the response. It's not the vacation time that I'm worried about. It's the fact that I'm being told to not report to work for a week. It's not a vacation--it's "don't come in and don't get paid but you're not laid off." Is that legal?

Yes, it is.