Imagine going into work on a day when almost everyone else has the day off since it’s a holiday. As an hourly employee, you would expect to get paid extra for working on a holiday, right?

In this story, one hourly employee is upset when she sees her paycheck after working on a holiday. She takes the issue to HR, but their response doesn’t even make sense. She takes the issue to her boss, and he completely understands, but instead of dealing with HR, he offers another suggestion.

She decides to take his advice, and it works in her favor. Keep reading to hear all the details and to see if you would’ve done the same thing.

Overtime on overtime

Happened a few weeks ago.

In a company of 3k employees, only 2-3% are paid by the hour. So most of the time HR forget about us when they implement new systems.

Normally overtime must be approved in advance by the superior.

There was a paid national holiday but because of the nature of my specific work I had to come in anyway. It was approved and all was normal until I checked my pay slip.

Uh-oh!

Normal week is 40h, thus paid holiday is 8h. Overtime is 1.5x normal hours.

We do our time sheet day by day. So I put monday 8h holiday + 8h worked overtime, rest of the week the same (8h each).

On my pay slip they paid 40h regular and the 8h holiday so i was missing the overtime part.

This doesn’t make sense.

I send an email to HR to see whats up and the reply was that since it was holiday i couldnt possibly be working so the system doesnt allow for overtime on said days.

At that point i went to see my boss and explained the situation. Why cant i put hours worked on holiday if i must work and why, if i couldnt be working, they still payed me regular hours ? Makes no sence and we have 10 paid holiday per year so its a reccurent issue.

I also presented the point in our national legislation that said i was right: Holiday must be included in the initial 40h so anything extra is overtime.

Her boss had a suggestion.

We just came out of a year and a half battle with HR because they didnt took overtime in calculation for our vacations.

My boss didnt want to start again so soon, so he asked how many hours we are talking.

8h but only the overtime part so 4 actual hours.

He told me to just put these hours this week and for next times to put 16h on a work day and no time worked on holiday to not brake the system.

Time to comply.

So i did just that.

Normally i would have to take a part of friday off to not do overtime but he told me to put it this week so it was like approval to me.

So i did 40h and put those 4h in overtime.

The following week he asked me about it with a smile, telling me i see what you did there.

Not much but i did get a few extra bucks out of it.

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HR sounds really problematic at this company.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who took a new dress code policy to a whole new level.

Let’s see how Reddit responded.

This person says HR is lying.

Always get it in writing.

An employee who works salary weighs in.

Here’s another story about an overtime mixup.

It can be very frustrating to put in the hours but not get paid fairly. It’s even more frustrating in this story when HR doesn’t seem to know what they’re talking about. Their policy doesn’t even make sense.

The boss is clearly on the employee’s side, but avoiding dealing with HR will only make the problem continue instead of resolving anything. It would’ve been better if the boss had taken if up with HR instead of just approving a workaround to make sure the employee got the pay she deserved.