The 38-Hour Seasonal
For 14 months, Kyle has worked as a seasonal recreation aide at 38 hours a week, paid hourly with no benefits. Your personnel policy defines seasonal as six months or fewer at no more than 29 hours per week. He was extended twice by his supervisor, who also loans him to the maintenance crew two afternoons a week. Kyle now asks for health coverage and shows you three pay periods in the last eight where he logged 44 to 46 hours; none of the overtime was pre-approved. A second aide, who works 24 hours a week, has already asked HR why Kyle gets full-time hours. Next month the department opens two new after-school sites, and Kyle is the only staff member trained on your registration software.
1. What is your exposure here, and what are your first three actions?
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Exposure has three separate components; treat them separately.
- Wage and hour. Hours over 40 in a workweek are payable at the overtime rate whether or not the supervisor approved them. Unauthorized overtime is still compensable; the remedy for the violation is supervision, not withholding pay. Reconstruct the three periods and pay the difference.
- Benefit eligibility. A 14-month, 38-hour-per-week assignment fails any reasonable seasonal test and sits well above the common 30-hour threshold used to define full-time status for benefit purposes. That is a classification decision for HR and counsel, not for you at the front desk. If eligibility is triggered, expect it to apply to similarly situated staff, not just Kyle.
- Policy and equity. Your own policy caps seasonal work at six months and 29 hours. The supervisor broke it twice, and the second aide has already noticed. Unequal treatment is the fastest route to a grievance.
First three actions:
- Do not promise or deny benefits at the counter. Tell Kyle you are reviewing his classification with HR and give him a date for an answer.
- Pull timesheets for every seasonal employee, not just Kyle, so you know whether this is one person or a pattern. Size the problem before you describe it.
- Book time with HR/counsel on reclassification, back pay, and whether any current positions are misclassified. Do not quietly convert him to part-time hours to dodge the question; a sudden reduction after a benefits request reads as retaliation.
2. How do you handle the overtime and the supervisor who approved none of it?
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Pay the overtime, then fix the behavior that created it.
- Pay first, discipline later. Withholding pay for unapproved hours converts a supervisory problem into a wage claim. Calculate the premium for the three periods and process it as a correction with a written explanation.
- Coach the supervisor against specifics. Bring the timesheets, the policy language, and the maintenance-loan habit. Two afternoons a week on a 38-hour base guarantees overtime; the supervisor effectively scheduled it. The conversation is about schedule design, not intent.
- Document the conversation in writing with concrete expectations: a hard weekly cap, a pre-approval step for any exception, and a copy of the timesheet review to you each Friday.
- Do not discipline Kyle for the hours themselves. You may apply a clearly communicated pre-approval rule going forward, applied to everyone. Retroactive discipline for hours you are simultaneously paying as owed looks inconsistent and will not survive a grievance.
- Address the loan-out directly. If maintenance genuinely needs those hours, that is a maintenance staffing request. Solve it with an approved part-time position or a reallocated shift, not by borrowing a seasonal aide into overtime.
The judgment point: the supervisor's calendar created a payroll liability. Fixing the calendar is the only durable remedy.
3. What systemic changes do you make so this cannot recur across the department?
Read the worked answer
Four controls, each cheap and auditable.
- Hard hour caps with a scheduling gate. No seasonal schedule publishes above 29 hours without a written exception signed by you. A cap that lives only in a policy manual is decorative.
- A monthly hours report by employee and by position. One page, run from payroll, reviewed against seasonal status. This is how you catch a 14-month extension in month four instead of month fourteen.
- Supervisor training on the three rules they actually break: overtime is payable regardless of approval, classification is not a scheduling tool, and loaning staff between work groups still counts toward the same hour total.
- Kill the single point of failure. Kyle being the only person trained on registration software is an operational risk independent of the HR problem. Cross-train two staff this quarter and document it.
Also revisit the position descriptions. If the department needs 38 hours of registration and maintenance support year-round, the honest answer is a permanent part-time or full-time position with benefits, not a seasonal title carrying permanent work. Fixing the title fixes the classification problem and the second aide's fairness question at the same time.