What would be a good system to use for vacation and personal days for employees, preferably one that would not be abused by said employees?

What do you mean by “abuse”? Personal time is personal time. The reason an employee takes it is none of his/her employer’s business. Whether they’re caring for their sick mother, taking the kid to the pediatrician, recovering from a night of partying, or just don’t feel like going to work that day, who cares? That shouldn’t be the employer’s concern, at all. If you think they’re taking too much personal time, you limit the amount of personal time they can have.

My company for example, has 10 sick days, two of which can be used for personal time. The other 8 require caring for self or family due to medical reasons. Of course, this is still on the honor system as we don’t require “doctor’s notes” or any such thing, but still…

maybe the employer should have at least one extra person on the schedule every day, so that if someone calls in, the rest are not too extra busy but there would be no need to have someone come in from home and get OT. it would be like having a “floater” around at all times.

My employers have always operated on the system where personal and vacation time can only yield regular hourly pay.

This means that if you use personal days in a week beyond having already worked a full regular week, the personal time still would be calculated as regular.

If the employee has worked all his regular hours, and gets called in to work, he should get the hours, and if they go beyond the regular hours worked, he should get overtime.

Just calculate it all at the end of the week. But personal time should be added up AFTER all the other time, and if the total WITH personal time accounted for exceeds Regular Hours + Personal Hours (say, 48 total hours for a full week plus 8 hours personal time), then those hours beyond that would be OT.

@gambitking I think you misunderstood the OP’s point about overtime. He’s not saying the employee taking Personal Time gets overtime. He’s saying the employee who has to be called in – who’s not regularly scheduled to work at that point – to replace the one going on Personal Time, is going to earn overtime.

Person X is scheduled to work M-F 8am-4pm
Person Y is scheduled to work M-F 4pm-12am.
Person X leaves 4 hours early, at noon, on Wednesday.
Boss calls Person Y, to come in 4 hours early, at noon, on Wednesday, to cover.
Person Y will now end up with 44 hours worked this week, meaning 4 hours of overtime pay.

How about having a rotating employee scheduled for a 32 hour week and that employee is the one on-call for that week. That employee would be paid whether he was actually called in or not. That way there will be no overtime pay. If you have 4 employees that might be called in that means each employee would be on call once a month. They could also be called in on an extra busy day.

The way you make sure no one “abuses” the system is to make sure they don’t lose the days they don’t take. If someone doesn’t take their personal days, pay them a half day’s pay for every day they didn’t use that year. By not taking the day off they earn more money.

My Employer is running a very tight ship here We have over 65% going out in payroll alone. The rest is for the building and state of the art facilities and equipment. We can’t afford to have extra people on the shift unless production is up and demands it. Your right our Vacation time cannot be paid as overtime, only reg time. We do have an oncall system but again thats only for emergencys. I’m all for paid personal/sick days but my senior dosen’t want to pay OT for the person comming in to cover that shift. Hell, I’m not even sure what question to ask here! LOL I need a system that will allow a person to take time off and get paid if they need to (Because they are sick)yet will strongly discourage abusers of the system. Is there such a system?

if the person who gets called in has worked more than 40 hours, they should get OT. Nobody should be working 50 or 60 hours (especially unplanned hours) and just get straight time. it would be cheaper for the boss to have one extra person than have to pay OT for the on-call person. but the on-call person should not suffer by working straight time when it’s more than 40 hours.

It is not really any business of the employer what the employees do with their time off. Many businesses now are allotting the full number of days, including “sick days”, “personal days” and “vacation days” at the beginning of the year, and all the days are called “personal days” it makes no difference what the employees uses them for.

My Grandson also works for a veterinary clinic, and he is the on-call person for everyone. Perhaps your boss could hire part-time (or even full time) people who are available all the time. It sounds like he is trying to make do with fewer people than he needs.

Hubby is also on-call 24 hours a day, and even his computer can call him when there is a problem. He is salaried, and received no overtime.