Salaried -Vacation & No Pay Illinois Illinois

[questionstoask]

Salaried employees of this company work more than 40 hours per week. We are often at the beck and call of our owner/employer on days off, vacations, weekends, sick days, etc. He has no respect at all for employee's time off. Choosing to ignore his calls is not a wise idea in terms of maintaining employment. If I take a day off (vacation time) and I am called to deal with something for work that takes a couple hours, I am still charged for the entire day off. If I leave an hour early to go to a dr. appt. I am required to take the time off as vacation time or with no pay.

Additionally, I am required to occasionally work Saturdays for shows or to cover for a retail employee or I may be required to stay late for meetings. Again, I do not receive pay for this, nor do I accrue any time off for the extra hours. I may have worked 10-20 additional hours in a week, but if I need to take time off the following week for an appointment or sick day, I must use my vacation time or not get paid for the time I am gone.

There are employees in another location of the company who are allowed to take additional time off during the week for any time they may have worked more than 40 hours in another week. This policy does not apply across the board.

I mentioned to my boss at one point in time that this practice seemed unfair and I was told that the answer to that was that he would simply require all salaried employees to work up to 70 hours per week. He used to be fairly flexible but in the last couple years, he has taken to micromanaging everyone. The rules for time off do not apply to him, however. As the owner of the company, he has earned 5 weeks vacation, but is gone on vacation and trips and days off more than 9 weeks a year. His vacation time is never officially "tracked", though, per his instructions to the payroll person.

Are there any laws or regulations on the books in Illinois that protect salaried employees?

[DAW]

Salary is just a payment method that means very little by itself. I can pay the janitor a salary if I want to. The key is Exempt status. Are you talking about Exempt employees who are paid a salary? (And if so, which classifications)? Or are you taking about non-exempt employees who are paid a salary? Legally two very different things. Non-exempt employees are subject to minimum wage and overtime rules, even if you pay them a salary. And Exempt employees are subjec to the rules specific to their Exemot classification which may or may not include a Salary Basis requirement. There are something like 100 or Exempt classifications defined in the federal FLSA law, only four of which have a Salaried Basis requirement. You can pay any of the other Exempt classification employees a salary, but that by itself does not impose the Salaried Basis rules (29 CFR 541.602).