FORCED LEAVE

Hello.

I'm sending this message to ask an important question, as I have not received any decent response from anyone in my company.

I will lay down the details to better explain what happened. My company had long been planning to rent a new office, and after months, it finally happened. Friday, October 20, 2017, we were told that it would be our last day at our old spot, which means on Monday, we would have to go straight to the new one. However, on October 22, 2017, Sunday, we received a message from Human Resource that we don't have work the following day because they were not done preparing the new office.

The text message read, "Hi. Good evening. This is *** from HR. Please be advised that you don't have a work tomorrow. This is due to our transfer. Just please keep posted for further announcement. Thank you."

I knew the week preceding the transfer that they were going to move everything that weekend. I, personally, don't know what happened exactly, as we did not hear anything other than "due to our transfer." We were clueless as to why the new office could not be occupied yet.

We let that pass and took the Monday off. However, that same day, a co-worker found out that a selected group of people were told to report to work. Our immediate supervisor sent a message to what she called the core group and told those who are part of the group to go to work. (That was the first time we ever heard about the core group. None of those who were forced to go absent knew how the members of the group were selected, the basis for it, etc.)

I stayed silent, still hoping that we would get our pay even though we weren't asked to show up. But when I got to work on Tuesday, I asked the same HR staff member (the one who sent the message) if Monday was a paid leave, but she said no, because we were only "advised." Only those who were personally asked to show would get a day's pay.

I don't know what the whole response meant, to be honest. Is she implying that we still had an option to go to work? That if only we didn't take the "advice," we wouldn't lose anything. One whole day's worth of pay is a big amount, so I'm asking you if it was "legal" for them not to pay us. Am I and several other officemates in the position to demand to get paid for that leave?


Thank you so much.

Company usually pay the employee for the work they have rendered. Thus there is a term no work no pay.

Since this is a transfer of office, the company might have only scheduled some employees to report to work because they are the ones who will be doing manual work of fixing the office.

To answer your question, yes it is legal for them not to pay you since you didn't report for work. If you want to be paid for that day, you can file a vacation leave.

Hi.

Thanks for the reply.

By the way, the ones who showed up didn't do manual work. The "core group," as how my boss called it, the members of which do the same job as some of us who were forced to go on leave. We do the same task, yet they were told to report to work, even though they did not do anything during the first half of the shift (a colleague who was here reported).

If they left us with an option to go either show up or not, we would have come. All of us would have, but the tone of the text message didn't give us any choice. I read that leaves like this are only allowed if calling the employees in would lead to serious losses or for cost-cutting purposes. But I believe that's not the case. The situation was preventable, the company just failed to.

But again, thanks for the reply. Guess this time, we just have to bite our tongue and let it all pass.