Quote:
Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist
Employment standards in Alberta says minimum 3 hrs for being called in I believe
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I assume it's different if you don't actually show up anywhere. The spirit of the three-hour rule is more to compensate somebody for the time, effort and expense in showing up somewhere only to be turned away. I think it's different if you walk from one bedroom in your house to the other bedroom across the hall.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rathji
Either would be nice.
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What would be nice and what is fair are two different things.
If she isn't being productive for two weeks (in a revenue-generating sense), then it can be difficult for her employer to pay her. I pay my hourly employees for the hours they work. I make money from their time. If they aren't here, I don't make money, so what am I supposed to pay them with?
Paying employees an hourly rate is flexible for them and for the employer. If I want them to work more, they know I'll pay them more (versus a salaried employee that isn't entitled to overtime pay). If they want to work less, they get paid less. If something that happens out of both of our control and they can't work, it's sort of left up to me what I want to do. I can sustain paying them for a little while (like in the floods when I sent everybody home with pay), but as a small business I have to look at the long-term financial health of the business for the good of me and all the other employees. I can't be expected to pay somebody for two weeks of work where they accomplished nothing because of a technical issue*.
*The nature of the job and of the technical issue could sway me one way or another on this (to pay or not to pay), but frankly we still don't have enough information from Rathji to make the call. It reads to me like we're getting just enough information to be sympathetic to his side.
As for paying her for the technical troubleshooting, I still think that is fair, provided the hours are modest and she is actually qualified to troubleshoot the problems. In her shoes, I just can't see myself letting this go on for weeks and still expecting pay.