Do you have a question related to employment law, wage and hour issues, or human resources? Members can get free information from CBIA’s experts by calling 860.244.1900.
By Mark Soycher and Lynn Atkinson
CBIA human resources experts
Q: Our employees can take paid time off (PTO) for a variety of reasons, including personal time, vacations, the employee’s own illness, or to assist an ill family member. We are now planning to expand this PTO benefit to cover all the situations stipulated in the state’s new paid sick leave law. Under our Current policy, any unused time at the end of the year is paid out in cash to employees. Can we continue that practice in 2012?
A: For employees who are not eligible for PTO under Connecticut’s new paid sick leave law, you may continue this practice without any changes.
However, the new law requires that covered “service workers” be permitted to carry over the time into the next year. You may still offer the option of cashing out unused time, but you also will have to offer the carryover option.
Keep in mind that the law permits limiting the total paid sick leave available to employees to 40 hours a year, so if carryover time plus new time accrued totals more than 40 hours in the year, you may cap it at 40 if you choose.
Q: As a manufacturing company, we are exempt from the new paid sick leave law, correct?
A: Most likely yes, but not in all cases. The law exempts business “establishments” classified as manufacturers under the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS sectors 31, 32, or 33).
The NAICS system, however, refers to a business’s physical location as an “establishment,” and an entire company as an “enterprise.”
Under the NAICS system, each establishment is assigned a NAICS sector number based on the primary business activity taking place at that location. Workers at a manufacturing enterprise with only one facility or location will be exempt.
But in the case of a manufacturing enterprise with numerous facilities or establishments, manufacturing establishment workers will be exempt, while nonmanufacturing establishment service workers will be covered. For example, where a facility’s primary business activity involves research, sales, distribution, warehousing, administrative work, etc., service workers at that establishment will be entitled to paid sick leave.
Q: We’ve hired a new employee who will be working 32 hours per week. She wants to work four eight-hour days without a lunch break each day. Is that OK? One of our supervisors says that any employee who works that many hours a day is required to take a meal beak.
A: Under Connecticut law, any employee who works for seven-and-a-half hours is entitled to a half-hour unpaid meal break between the first two hours and the last two hours of work.
Employees cannot be required to forego a meal break, although an employee and employer are permitted “to enter into a written agreement providing for a different schedule of meal periods.”
That means that your employee can ask to forego lunch—the request must be truly voluntary—and you are free to agree to the arrangement. Be sure to get her request in writing and have a signed, written agreement regarding her schedule.
Other exceptions to the rule requiring meal breaks are situations where:
- Requiring compliance could put public safety at risk
- A position’s duties can be performed by only one employee
- There are four or fewer employees on a shift at the same facility
- The continuous nature of an employer’s operations requires that employees be available to respond to urgent or unusual conditions at all times
Employers may not apply these exemptions automatically but must request and receive approval from the state Department of Labor.
The law also exempts employers from the half-hour unpaid meal break requirement if employees are provided 30 or more minutes of paid rest—for example, two 15- minute paid breaks—during the seven-and-a-half hour work period. Few employers adopt this practice, however, and any employer who does must be prepared to show that the employees did in fact take those paid breaks.
