Edit: This is in Texas
TL;DR - my company gave me 216hrs of PTO for 2021 but my department (my department only) barely allowed me to use any (I still have 180hrs remaining). The company policy will only let me carry over 40hrs to 2022,and sell back 40hrs, potentially making me lose 100hrs of my 2021 PTO. This is unethical (IMO) but is it against some labor law?
I'm suspecting the answer is, "That's a shitty thing to do, but technically it's not violating any labor laws." But I'd love to be informed otherwise.
At my position/seniority at my job I get 136hours (17 days) of PTO per year. It is given in bulk on Jan 1. Traditionally company policy has been that as of Dec 31 that year, the employee can carry over to the following year up to 40hrs, pay out up to 40hrs, and anything remaining unused is lost.
For 2020 the company policy was temporarily amended to allow 80hours to be carried over to 2021. Because of reasons, I carried over the full 80hr allotment and began 2021 with 216hrs of PTO in my bucket.
Here where my issue begins. My department was working on a particularly difficult project and senior management made it known in about Feb that about 5-6 months of the remaining year would be "PTO blackout" and they would not approve PTO requests. Unofficially that became more frequent denials of PTO even in the supposedly "non-blackout" times. ("Sorry, the workload is too high right now") And eventually this progressed into "We expect everyone to clock minimum 60hrs/wk until further notice".
The real kicker is that in addition to basically being unable to use any of my large PTO stockpile, the company policy is back to normal for 2021 and I can only carry over 40hrs to 2022.
So here I sit in November with 180hrs of PTO banked, only able to sell back 40,only able to carry over 40,and being told I basically can't use any of the remaining 100hrs and will likely lose 2.5 weeks of vacation.
I know this is shitty and unethical, but is it violating labor law in any way?
Submitted November 01, 2021 at 10:29AM by upvotes_cited_source https://ift.tt/3pW3Rlt
