Pay for Holidays Under Compressed Work Schedules

The Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) administration of pay for holidays under the compressed and flexible work schedules experiment was examined. A compresssed work schedule is one in which the basic 80-hour biweekly work requirement is completed in less than 10 workdays. OPM implementing regulations provide that employees on a compressed work schedule receive pay for a holiday equal to pay for the number of hours they would ordinarily be required to work on that day. Thus, an employee on a 4-day workweek would receive 10 hours' holiday pay, and holidays occurring on an employee's nonworkday would be observed on the workday preceeding or succeeding that day. Those Federal employees participating in the compressed work schedule experiments would receive extra time off from work for each of the legal public holidays and their workweek would be reduced in the biweekly periods in which holidays occur. Employees on regular schedules and flexible schedules would not have reduced workweeks and would receive only 8 hours pay for holidays.

Title I of the Act specifies that employees under a flexible work schedule are entitled to only 8 hours' pay for a holiday. However, Title II of the Act is silent about pay for holidays not worked under compressed schedules. OPM implementing regulations are consistent with a statute providing an ordinary day's pay for a holiday. They are also consistent with the Act in that they provide a compressed schedule employee who works on a holiday with holiday premium pay for the hours worked that do not exceed the daily basic work requirement; hours worked on a holiday in excess of the daily basic work requirement would be paid as overtime. GAO endorsed the experiments with flexible and compressed work schedules, but the added expense of the extra time off for holidays is of concern. This is inequitable to other employees. GAO believes employees on a compressed work schedule should receive no more or no less paid absences from their work than those employees on flexible or traditional work schedules.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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