As you can guess from the title of this post, “paid weekly holidays” mean that you should pay an employee for every Sunday even if he takes the day off.
This is a system that is hard to find in other countries. Granting a weekly holiday to an employee is not unusual but enforcing the holiday as a paid holiday is what makes things complicated. It gets even more confusing when an employer should calculate what he is supposed to pay for a holiday work, in other words, an employee who worked on a Sunday.
A. How much should an employer pay for this paid weekly holiday?
This payment is called an allowance for paid weekly holidays. It is a default payment made to an employee for a Sunday regardless of whether he works or not on a Sunday.
There is no law specifying the amount of the allowance for the paid weekly holidays. However, guidelines of the Ministry of Employment and Labor and court rulings all agree that the allowance should be wage for 8 hours’ work.
With full-time employees, employers tend to include the allowance in their monthly salary. Therefore, in most cases, employees do not directly receive the allowance every week.
A requirement to get this paid weekly holiday, in other words, to take a Sunday off and also get the allowance, is to work on every workday during the week.
What if an employee missed a couple of workdays? In that case, he can still have a weekly holiday but the employer does not have to pay him the allowance for weekly holidays. An employee failing to work full weekdays is only entitled to “unpaid” weekly holidays.
B. How do we calculate wages and allowances for an employee who worked on a Sunday?
First, there is the default allowance, amounting to 8 hours’ wage, for the Sunday as the “paid” weekly holiday.
Second, there is wages for the work actually done on the Sunday.
Third, holiday work premium should be paid as 50 percent of hourly ordinary wage if an employee’s holiday work is done within 8 hours.
Fourth, for holiday work exceeding 8 hours, holiday work premium is 100 percent of hourly ordinary wage.
Why is it 100 percent? Actually, the 100 percent is comprised of 50 percent as holiday work premium and another 50 percent as overtime work premium for work exceeding 8 hours a day.
Don’t forget that working on a Sunday is allowed only when the employee has not reached the maximum work hours during weekdays. The maximum work hours per week or seven days are 52 hours (statutory 40 hours plus 12 hours as legally allowed maximum overtime).
If your employee already exhausted the maximum work hours during weekdays, you cannot make him work at all on the Sunday. **
** This section applies to companies with 300 or more employees where the 52 hours as maximum work hours per week are in place.
Now let’s calculate a total pay for a case. Suppose an employee worked 10 hours on a Sunday.
Here are the wages and allowances he should be given.
i. 8 hours’ wage as the default allowance for the paid weekly holiday regardless of whether he worked or not on the Sunday. Usually, it is already included in his monthly wage.
ii. 10 hours’ wage for actual work done on the Sunday
iii. 4 hours’ wage as holiday work premium allowance. (50 percent of the first 8 hours)
iv. 2 hours’ wage as holiday work premium allowance for holiday work that exceeds 8 hours (100 percent of the additional 2 hours)
The total wages and allowances to be given to the employee is wage for 24 hours.
Even if you don’t count the default holiday allowance for 8 hours, which is usually included in the monthly wage, you should pay money for 16 hours if you let an employee work 10 hours on a Sunday.
N.B. This post is based on a case of a full-time employee with a 40-hour workweek. When you calculate a part-timer’s paid weekly holidays, you should use a different method. Hopefully, it will be my next post.
