The company I work for just changed our work hours and pay to save money. I totally understand this because buisness is way down. I want to make sure we are not breaking any laws. Our normal work week was Monday through Friday 8-5. We recently changed to Monday through Thursday 8-5 requireing exempt employees to take a 20% cut in pay. My question has to deal with travel and conferance calls on Saturdays and Sundays. Can we require our exempt employees do these things on the weekend eventhough we have cut thier pay because of the shorter work week. It looks like we are trading Sunday for Friday.

Thanks
Concerned

Did the employees previously have travel and conference calls on the weekend?

Well, they are exempt, so legally you can require the same amount of work be performed, no matter when it must occur. Now, for morale's sake, you have a whole different issue.

The past history on travel has varied by employee and where they were going. Example: one employee who travels once a month to one of our remote sites did not travel on Sunday's last year and know he is being asked to leave on Sunday (instead of Monday morning) and return on Thursday instead of Friday.

What I was getting at was whether the travel and conference calls represented a change. If they'd always had the travel and the conferences, then you're not substituting any days of the week because this was always part of the job.

This is a tricky issue. For the example I posted the person typically traveled on Monday and Friday for thier job and now the company is asking the to travel on Sunday and Thursday. This change happen the same time the company went to a 4 day work week and cut everyone's pay by 20%. This has the appearance of trading Sunday for Friday.

Everyone here understands the state of the buisness but it is hard for some of the employees who have been exempt for years putting in extra hours and days to get the job done and now being treated like an hourly employee when it comes to reduced pay. Especally since everyone was told they could not work on Friday's, not to even take a phone call. But it is ok for everyone to work on Saturday and Sunday's.

You have one more potential issue. Anytime you alter the duties that an employee performs, you risk altering the Exempt status. Some employer consider Exempt to be sort of like a life time flu shot, one which vaccinates employees against paid overtime. The problem is that the law considers the Exempt status to be transitory and a function of the current job duties (and sometimes the industry). Change the duties (or even the mix of job duties), and maybe you also change the Exempt status. Also, there is not the one big Exempt status that everyone thinks exists. Instead the FLSA law has something like 100 or so exemptions from either overtime or minimum wage or both. The employer has to not only say that an employee is Exempt but also has to support exactly which exemption they were subject to. For example, I am an accountant but not a CPA. I have never been eligible for the Professional exemption. Over the years however I have sometimes been Non-Exempt and sometimes Exempt under (at different times) the Executive and Administrative exceptions.

Smart employers keep their internal job descriptions fresh. This should include not only duties but estimates on how much time is spent on each duty. The job descriptions should reviewed any time a known change occurs or no worse the annually. I have worked for employers whom write a 1/2 page justification of any job description considered Exempt spelling out exactly which FLSA classification is being claimed and why. These employer generally have more then one person review the classification because not surprisingly, there is often disagreement. While most classifications can be pretty obvious, many are not, and it is often necessary to have a professional review things and spell out the rules to the employer.