Expert: Shirley McAllister, CPP, PHR - 5/2/2008

Question
QUESTION: Can you tell me if exempt, per diem employees have to clock
in an out?

Thank you.

ANSWER: I do not know what you mean by a per diem employee.

Clocking in and out refers to exempt and non exempt employees as referring to regulation standards. Any employee can be asked to clock in and out.

Exempt employees only clock in and out for record keeping purposes and they are paid by the job and not by the hour. They cannot be docked for partial days off, although Vacation and PTO can be used. Exempt employees are not paid overtime.

Non-exempt employees clock in and out for payroll reasons and the timecard becomes a legal document. They are paid for every hour they work and overtime for all worked hours over 40.

Independent contractors do not clock in and out as they are running their own business and if they are asked to clock in and out it would make them employees.

If you wish to explain per diem employee I will try and fit you into one of the employee categories.

Shirley

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Hi again Shirley,

Per diem basically means hourly (a lot of hospitals use this terminology).  I am also referring to the state of California.  
I can understand needing to keep track of an hourly employee's hours.  The tricky part is that I am exempt (under California State law, I thought that organization's as a rule, should not have exempt employees "clocking in and out" as they have the propensity to loose their exempt status).

Thanks.

Answer
Clocking in and out does not affect the exempt status of an employee. A lot of companies have hourly employees clocking in and out for recording purposes and that is okay.

It is okay as long as it is not used against the exempt employee. In other words you cannot be docked if you clock in late or clock out early if you are exempt.

If you are classified as hourly than you are not classified by the company as exempt. You need to talk to Human Resources about your job classification.

They may have you misclassified as non exempt.

There are many reasons that they may ask employees either exempt or non exempt to clock in and out.  One of them is so they know who is there and who is not. I can see this in a hospital. The other is for paperwork reasons. The department of labor requires that they have records of hours worked for all employees exempt and non exempt on record for them to examine at any given time. Lots of companies use the clock in and out system to bill for projects and some nursing homes for different patients, lawyers for different cases.

Shirley