A Difficult Negative MessageTaking Away Extra Pay

Your organization employs far more part-time than fulltime workers. Part-timers are paid hourly, up to 15 hours per week, and full-timers are salaried under contract for 40 hours per week.

Both groups share many job responsibilities, though full-timers are also expected to take leadership roles that require their attendance in meetings, on committees, and at community programs. For part-timers, participation is voluntary. To encourage more part-timers to participate, though, one of your managers decided to start paying them extra for their attendance.

Now several full-timers are protesting the move. While they are sympathetic to paying part-timers for additional time, the full-timers note their duties often require them to spend more than 40 hours per week on the job. Because raises and promotions are tied to manager evaluations, they believe they are being pressured to participate without additional compensation. Paying part-timers but not full-timers for extra time only exacerbates the situation.

The manager believes that part-timers are already underpaid for doing many of the same duties as full-timers, that full-timers should be grateful to have jobs with benefits, and that full-timers should be motivated by more than money to attend. The full-timers should be held to a higher standard as role models for the part-timers.

You checked with your Human Resources Department and found that because attendance by part-timers is voluntary, paying them extra is inappropriate. In addition, recent high-profile lawsuits for overtime pay have resulted in even salaried workers expecting compensation for work beyond 40 hours per week. Therefore, you must end the program started by the manager and find a way to reign in the extra hours full-timers may be working.

Write a memo informing all employees that the extra pay program will end in two weeks.