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With Shutdown Over, OPM provides Guidance on Back Pay for Federal Employees

Posted on February 14, 2019August 12, 2020 by Alan Lescht

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In late January, federal employees across the country returned to work for the first time in over a month. In an effort to provide retroactive pay as quickly as possible, The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has issued guidance to federal agencies impacted by the shutdown to explain how their employees should receive back pay and other benefits.

Back Pay

Employees who were furloughed will receive back pay at their standard rate of pay for the time that they would have been in a regular pay status if the shutdown had never occurred. This includes overtime pay, night pay or other premium pay (e.g. LEAP, holiday pay, etc.) that the employee would have received.

However, if an employee was scheduled to be in a non-pay status during the shutdown, including Leave Without Pay (LWOP) or serving a suspension, then the employee is not eligible for backpay during that period, including holidays.

For excepted employees who were required to work without pay during the shutdown, they will receive their regular pay for the hours they actually worked, including any overtime or other premium pay. Conversely, if the employee did not show up for work and did not request leave, they will be marked absent without leave (AWOL) and will not receive back pay.

For any employees who received unemployment payments during the shutdown, the state involved will receive notice of the back-pay amount and then make a determination as to what repayment is required.

Leave

Furloughed employees cannot be charged paid leave or other paid time off during the shutdown, even if they had prescheduled paid leave. On the other hand, excepted employees may be charged leave – and compensated for it through back pay – for periods during the furlough where they used paid leave in lieu of reporting to work.

Many employees were planning to take “use or lose” annual leave but were furloughed before they could do so. According to OPM, agencies must restore any annual leave that was scheduled in writing prior to November 24, 2018. Note that restoration of leave will not apply to scheduled leave for December 24, which was declared a federal holiday in 2018, unless the employee can show they would have rescheduled the leave for another day. Restoration also does not apply to leave that had previously been restored. In those instances, the leave is lost for good.

Similarly, employees who were unable to use compensatory time off in lieu of overtime pay due to the shutdown will be paid for such time. Compensatory time off for travel that was forfeited can be restored and extended for another 26 pay periods.

In regard to accruing leave during the shutdown, all employees receiving back pay are considered in a pay status for that period and will also accrue leave at normal rates.

FMLA

The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides unpaid leave for up to 12 weeks but employees are permitted to substitute paid leave during this time to continue receiving pay. For employees that were on FMLA during the shutdown, back pay will be dependent on whether the employee was scheduled to substitute paid leave. If the employee had planned to use paid leave during their FMLA leave period, these employees will not only receive back pay but they will also not be charged any leave. However, employees scheduled to be in a non-pay status (i.e. FMLA LWOP), will not receive back pay. For all employees using FMLA leave, the shutdown period will still count toward their 12 weeks of protected leave.

Benefits & Retirement

Employees are also entitled to retroactive benefits. Deductions will be taken out of the back-pay checks to cover employee contributions to health and retirement plans. Loan payments to Thrift Savings Plans (TSP) will also be made.

For those employees who requested to retire during the shutdown, the retirement will be made effective retroactively to the date requested and no back pay will be received after that date.

It isn’t yet clear when agencies will begin making these retroactive payments. If you believe the agency has incorrectly calculated your back pay or you have been improperly denied any benefits as a result of the shutdown, you should contact an experienced federal employment attorney to determine what options you have to protect your rights.

About the Author: Alan Lescht has been successfully litigating employment discrimination, civil rights, and commercial litigation cases for more than 30 years and has won dozens of notable trials. He is the founding partner of Alan Lescht and Associates, PC, where he oversees the firm’s employment litigation and counseling practices.

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Shutdown pain drags on for federal contractors, who won’t get back pay unless Democratic bill passes

Posted on January 31, 2019February 6, 2019 by Laura Clawson

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One of the key post-shutdown tests for Senate Republicans will be this: Do federal contract workers get back pay? Those workers, many of them among the lowest-paid in the government, didn’t get back pay after the 2013 shutdown, and it will only come this time through a separate bill, which Democrats have introduced, including up to $965 a week in back pay plus any sick days that people used to get through the shutdown.

The shutdown caused pain for hundreds of thousands of workers, perhaps most of all for these workers largely earning between $450 and $650 a week, more than a thousand of them in the expensive Washington, D.C., area, and without any guarantee, or even strong hope, of getting back pay when government reopened. Unemployment benefits weren’t a good answer, as one Smithsonian security guard discovered: The checks took weeks to start arriving and were hundreds of dollars short of his pay.

National Portrait Gallery cleaning supervisor Audrey Murray-Wright told the Washington Post that she couldn’t afford her blood pressure medication—which presumably would have been particularly important as she looked at a stack of bills she was behind on—but the worst part was that “I never, ever want to tell my son, ‘Don’t drink all that milk so you can save your brother some.’”

These people do important work for the government, for low pay. They deserve back pay every bit as much as if their checks came directly from the government rather than through a private company with a government contract. So, will Senate Republicans vote for, and Donald Trump sign, a bill to make them whole?

This blog was originally published at Daily Kos on January 29, 2019. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson is labor editor at Daily Kos.

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A Discussion on Granting Back Pay to Undocumented Workers under the NLRA and the IRCA

Posted on November 15, 2012November 15, 2012 by Jon L. Dueltgen

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WASHINGTON, D.C. – At a Cornell ILR Alumni Reception on September 20, 2012, I asked NLRB Chairman Mark Pearce, the keynote speaker, about the nearly six-year deliberation and unusual concurrence in Mezonos Maven Bakery, where the NLRB ultimately reversed an Administrative Law Judge’s (ALJ) 2006 decision granting back pay to undocumented workers under the NLRA. Speaking candidly, Chairman Pearce emphasized the importance of trying to find consensus in the Board’s voice, and the difficulty of reconciling this case with a 2002 Supreme Court holding in Hoffman Plastic Compounds v. NLRB that appeared to prohibit back pay remedies for undocumented workers. In recent weeks, Chairman Pearce has added that he “had angst over” the decision, and that “the concept of ‘made whole’ … needs to be examined [by us].”

I first became familiar with Mezonos (and a companion case, Imperial Buffet, though the restaurant-employer later went bankrupt) in the summer of 2011 when working as a Judicial Law Clerk for ALJs Steven Davis and Steven Fish—the finders-of-fact for those cases. These were cases where the employer had flouted their legal obligations to verify work documentation under IRCA, and then further violated the NLRA without having to pay out the central remedy of back pay because the workers were undocumented. Given the inequitable outcomes and the perverse incentives, ALJs Davis and Fish argued for a factual distinction of an employer who was doubly-liable under both IRCA and the NLRA from the Hoffman Plastics scenario of a worker fraudulently submitting false documents to an employer following the legal requirements under IRCA.

On August 9, 2011, the NLRB in its 3-0 decision, following some bruising years after the Boeing case, operating without a sufficient quorum, and an unprecedented attempt by House Republicans to defund the independent agency, locked into politically safe position of extending the Hoffman Plastics holding to cover the Mezonos factual scenario, though then Chairwoman Liebman and incoming Chairman Pearce wrote a concurrence critical of this perverse outcome.

Although a re-thinking of “making whole” may provide a more adequate array of remedies than mere back pay, which is the NLRB’s only real stick in ensuring compliance with its rulings, the NLRB had a strong jurisprudential basis in which to use the fault-based analysis to factually distinguish the Mezonos scenario from Hoffman Plastics. Specifically, there are examples in tort law and contract law, including the “last clear chance” doctrine and exceptions to in pari delicto, which ensure that the fault-ridden party is ultimately held liable even in a legal regime that might suggest otherwise.

As reconsideration was denied by the NLRB in December 2011, if this case ultimately finds its way into the Second Circuit (or, less likely, the D.C. Circuit), it would be worth considering how these arguments for a fault-based analysis might just result in a ruling that helps protect labor rights while still achieving the aims of our national immigration policy. After all, much angst might be resolved by having reconcilable laws work together, rather than interpreting them at cross-purposes.

This article is based on Jon L. Dueltgen’s award winning essay. He placed second place in a writing competition on labor and employment law offered by the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers. An earlier version of the paper also received recognition from the Louis Jackson National Writing competition.

About the Author: Jon L. Dueltgen is a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania and a graduate of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. His paper on Mezonos Brooklyn Bakery: A Bridge Too Far for Hoffman Plastics was most recently recognized by the ABA/College of Labor and Employment Law National Writing Competition.

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Workplace Fairness

Tag: back pay

With Shutdown Over, OPM provides Guidance on Back Pay for Federal Employees

Shutdown pain drags on for federal contractors, who won’t get back pay unless Democratic bill passes

A Discussion on Granting Back Pay to Undocumented Workers under the NLRA and the IRCA

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