Is there a NC labor lawyer in here? I have questions.

[DarkPhenyx]

If a company has a published pay scale are they required to pay you at a rate within that pay scale? How about if you were hired in at a lower position but subsequently promoted into that position?

Also, if it is discovered that they have been shorting you on your vacation time, and they later inform you of this, are they required to give you the back vacation time that you earned?

last one. What is the legality of a company forcing you to use your vacation time during a blizzard, particularly when the State has told everyone to stay off the roads?

[HFishbine]

1. Are you a teacher's aide? (nt)

[DarkPhenyx]

2. No, I'm a research scientist...

...doing anti-cancer research.

[HFishbine]

3. Oh

Some of your issues sounded like some being faced by teachers' assistants.

Try here: http://www.nclabor.com/

[DarkPhenyx]

5. Thanks.

I'll go look. I'm also e-mailing NCDL and getting their input.

[surfermaw]

4. Another question for a N.C lawyer

If a company who hired you at one place lets say 40 miles from your home and payed for your car and fuel, then sends you over 100 miles in another direction and has paid you car allowance for a long time, can they just stop your car allowance..something to the tune of 5 thousand dollars a year?

[AP]

6. Not an NC lawyer, but this would generally depend on your

employment contract. And if your employment contract doesn't cover this (or you don't have a written contract) it would depend on what you agreed to do. Anything set out in the manuals you received would most likely be considered binding written terms of your employment.

If you have nothing in writing, did you have an oral agreement? (Does NC allow oral contracts that cover this issue? Some states require agreements for employment that lasts more than a year to be in writing -- so, even if you thought you had an oral agreement about this issue, if NC requires you to have >1 year employment contracts to be in writing, the terms wouldn't be binding because they were not in writing.)

If your employment contract doesn't cover this, and you didn't have an express oral agreement that was binding, you still might be able to argue that it was an implied term of your employment contract, but that would be hard to prove and complicated, and I suspect that if you want to maintain good relations with that employer you're not going to go through the mutual expense of trying to prove this.

One last possibility: there might be some state statute that covers this.

The lesson for everyone here is that if your employer is giving you something as valuable as this (5K/year) to an employee, you should get the promise to pay you in writing. (Just because it's valuable and you're clearly relying on it doesn't mean that a contract exists for them to continue providing it.)

If anyone is in this situation, you should make sure that this is one of the terms of your employment agreement. Even if you didn't have this as a term of your original written employment contract, or if you didn't have a written agreement, you'd want to make sure you get your employer to subsequently promise to keep paying you for that expense, and that they make the promise in writing. If they're promising you that they'll do something, all you have to do is get a letter from them signed by someone with the (real or, I believe, apparent) authority to make this promise.

Unfortunately, the bottom line here will most likely be that this was a perq that your employer was providing you voluntarily with no obligation to keep providing it. I'm presuming this is the case because if it were something they promissed you you probably wouldn't be asking if they can stop doing it.

You really should talk to a NC employment lawyer to see if there's anything you can do. You might also want to see if you can extract a promise from your employer to start paying you again for these expenses at some definite point in the future.