Can Employers Dock Pay For Being Unproductive At Work?

By Amy E. Feldman

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The genius researchers at Harvard have discovered that failure to get enough sleep results in a loss of worker productivity. They're apparently still working to determine if water is wet. That productivity drain calculates to a loss of 63.2 billion dollars for US companies. For whatever reason workers aren't sleeping enough-too much partying, too much worrying maybe about who's paying too much money to Harvard researchers.

Employers know that there are days that workers are just aren't getting anything done. If you show up at your desk but aren't productive, can you be docked for it? That depends. If you don't have a collective bargaining agreement and you're an hourly non-exempt worker, then the answer is no-your boss can discipline or fire you, but wage laws say that you have to be paid for your time. If you are not a nonexempt hourly worker but you are an employee of a company who is paid based on your production, you won't be paid for the work you don't produce, so long as your pay doesn't drop below minimum wage. And exempt workers are paid not based on time but on doing a job to completion-so you may wind up spending more time at your desk until you can get the job done.

Or get a new job as a Harvard researcher, which is apparently a pretty good gig.