What if you can’t get there?
I awoke Tuesday to a flooded front yard, and it wasn’t until late afternoon that the floodwaters receded enough to drive out of the neighborhood. Luckily, I had the luxury to work from home in circumstances like this.
But many workers face a harder choice: If they don’t make it in, they don’t get paid. Or worse, they could lose their job.
Generally speaking, companies don’t have to pay their hourly wage workers for the time they don’t work. But just following the letter of the law may not be the best approach to good employee relations during stressful weather disasters. That can be especially true when city and county leaders are advising residents to stay home to avoid the dangerous high water and residents are receiving frightening text messages about imminent flash flooding.
Ana Mosqueda thought briefly of not going to work Tuesday morning at a Wendy’s on Woodridge. But Mosqueda, who works in the kitchen for $8.50 an hour, said she was concerned she’d get in trouble if she didn’t report
for duty, so she left an hour early to be on time for her 9 a.m. shift. She drove in a roundabout way to avoid flooded streets.
If you’re on the schedule, you have to go to work, said Mosqueda, who is part of the Fight for $15 movement trying to boost the wages of fast-food workers.
Wendy’s manager Norma Rodriguez said her longtime employee need not have worried. As long as employees call in advance and say they can’t make it, there’s no problem, she said. Someone else could have covered the shift.
People understand flooding, Rodriguez said. No one wants employees in danger.
Other workers are more confident in their options.
The Houston law office of Vorys Sater was open Tuesday despite the massive rains that made many of the roadways in the area impassable. Hourly paid employees who felt unsafe about coming in to work were told to stay home and will be paid as usual, said Jackie Ford, an employment lawyer who represents management clients.
“We want to incentivize safety,” she said.
And if the law firm opts to close in times of bad weather, it typically pays its hourly wage workers as usual.
“We think it’s the right thing to do,” she said.
Other companies have a philosophy that they pay employees only for the time they work or let them use vacation or personal days, if available. Ford cautions her clients to consider how that will affect employee morale in the short and long term.
“What message am I sending my other employees?” she said.
Then there is the risk of liability if an employee is instructed to come to work despite dangerous conditions and then gets hurt.
Ford recalled a fast-food employee required to work back-to-back shifts who then fell asleep while driving home and died. The company eventually prevailed, but its reputation took an enormous public relations hit.
Most Chase Bank branches in the Houston area delayed opening until 10 a.m., an hour or two later than usual.
People who were scheduled to work and came in on Tuesday will be paid for the full day, spokesman Greg Hassell said.
To make it easier on employees with unexpected child care needs, he added, Chase has two backup child care centers that had a lot more school-age children than normal on Tuesday.
While wages can be a vexing question, most employers don’t go further and fire employees who can’t make it to work because of dangerous road conditions.
Most are more reasonable than that, said Margie Harris, an employment lawyer at Butler & Harris who primarily represents individuals.
But she recalls a case from 1998 when a guard at a plant near Dallas heard a tornado was bearing down. People were urged to find shelter, and the guard sought cover in a nearby building. He was later terminated for leaving his post.
The guard sued for wrongful termination but eventually lost his case. Harris said she would have tried a broader legal tack, arguing that the guard couldn’t fulfill his contractual responsibility to work because of circumstances outside his control.
“It would be a darned good defense,” she said.