TO: Issues & Answers!

RE: Issue - "Hourly Worker Earned Vacation Time"

"We’re getting questions from our part-time hourly employees regarding our current vacation policies.

Their vacation period is currently earned based on total hours worked during a calendar year (ie: to qualify for one week they must work a certain minimum number of hours.)  As-such, certain employees may not accumulate enough total hours to qualify for their whole weeks of vacation. Some are even finding themselves just a few hours short of earning any vacation time due to scheduling policies!

Do you have any ideas how we can fairly deal with this situation?"

Thanks – please withhold my name and company information

FROM: Issues & Answers!

RE: Answer - "Hourly Worker Earned Vacation Time Question - June 2007"

Part time, short hour and/or on call positions are quite often different categories.  I would need to know which of these we are discussing in order to give you an appropriate, specific, answer to your inquiry.  I have researched the question for you and I can not find a definitive answer (resource) that I am comfortable referring you to.   In absence of that and because I do not know exactly which category you refer to I will give you a few general observations that may be helpful.

The entire hospitality industry depends heavily on this flexible labor group.  There are a number of reasons for this.  A few of them are: keeping labor costs in balance with hourly sales, to maintain a readily available, trained labor pool in order to deal effectively with short term peak sales periods/days, to efficiently cover no shows and unscheduled days off and to avoid incurring overtime.  All of this can be summed up by simply stating, this group of employees, managed well and cultivated properly can and does preserve an acceptable level of service while helping maintain appropriate labor costs.  These employees, if managed professionally will typically provide an operator a full ten percent, or more, savings on their total hourly labor costs.

A prudent manager will do everything, with-in reason, to attract and maintain this important element of their work force.  Vacations, paid days off, wage and benefits, for this group, are all very minor expenses when considered against the significant financial benefit they provide their employer.

As a Chief Operating Officer of a major firm with multi operating divisions in almost every aspect of the hospitality industry I assure you I made certain our company treated this special group of people as fairly as we possibly could. 

In answer to your specific question pertaining to your policy on calculating vacation pay for part time employees.  I strongly urge you to follow the policy used by the vast majority of progressive industry icons.  Your policy on the number of weeks an individual receives should be exactly the same as that of your full time employees.  It should be calculated based on how many hours (minimum weeks required but no minimum hours applied) an employee worked during a full year (preferably based on anniversary date).  Divide the hours by the actual number of weeks worked.  Thus if an employee worked one thousand hours, those hours were incurred during thirty-five actual weeks worked and the employee is in the two week vacation due category, they would be eligible to receive two fifteen hour weeks of vacation (their actual average work week.)

We hope this has been helpful.  Please feel free to contact Issues and Answers with any future questions.  We look forward to hearing from you.  

Your associates at Issues & Answers