suspension held in abeyance and final pay question Washington Washington

[lawlemming]

I am a hourly paid public school employee. Our pay checks are paid out one month after the pay period. I was given a 2 week suspension and filed a grievance over it. The district decided to put the suspension in my record but not have me serve it. However they said that if I do anything wrong, they will likely fire me and dock my final pay 2 weeks of the vacation that I would have been paid. If there isn't any vacation to pay out they will take 2 weeks of my regular pay. This would be hours that I have already worked. Is this legal?

our contract says that we are to be paid out any left over vacation after terminating employment for any reason. I am also a union steward and believe that I have been targeted for being very outspoken for employee's rights. I also believe that the union has looked the other way on many retaliations against me because of the good rapport they want to have with management.
Please cite any sources you may have.
Thank you

[DAW]

I can address part of your issue. But your state is not my state and I cannot address anything specific to WA state. Past that, governmental employment is very different from private sector employment. I mostly know the federal (FLSA) rules, but not WA rules. Also, I have no read your contract and that also may be a significant source.

Based only on what I actually do know.
- Federal law (FLSA) is interested in minimum wage, overtime and child labor. And pretty much nothing else. The feds normally have little or no interest in matters related to vacation. If you have unpaid wages based on actual time worked (not paid time off), the feds generally are interested in MW/OT violations.
- The feds have issued an opinion letter that recovering a negative vacation/PTO is not necessarily a federal wage/hour law violation. This is certainly a "read the fine print" type of letter.
http://www.dol.gov/whd/opinion/FLSAN...d_vacation.htm
- Past that, you are talking about WA state labor law or contract law specific to your CBA, neither of which I know.

This is as far as I can take you.