Determining the amount of annual leave for a full-time employee most often does not cause any problem for employers. Difficulties begin only when it comes to granting annual leave to part-timers.
This is because the rules for granting annual leave to this group of employees depend on how these employees perform their work, i.e. whether they perform their work on a daily basis (e.g., 4 hours a day), or whether they perform their work only a few days a week with different working hours.
So let’s start with how to correctly determine the amount of annual leave for a part-timer. Well, the determination of annual leave in such a case is made in proportion to the size of his/her working time (full-time), taking as a basis the size of the leave, resulting from his seniority/holiday seniority (that is, 20 or 26 days). Once this calculation is made, the part-day leave is rounded up to a full day.
After determining the part-timer’s leave in days, we convert this leave into hours. The above conversion is necessary in order to then correctly grant the amount of annual leave.
It should be borne in mind that annual leave is granted on days that are working days for the employee, in accordance with the employee’s work schedule, at an hourly rate corresponding to the employee’s daily working hours on a given working day (Article 154 (2) § 1 of the Labor Code).
For example, to a part-time employee with an annual leave dimension set at 13 vacation days (104 vacation hours), working 4 hours a day every day from Monday to Friday, whose working time norm is 8 hours a day, we will grant vacation for each of his/her working days, from Monday to Friday, 4 hours of his/her daily working time dimension. We will grant a total of 20 hours of annual leave (5 days x 4 hours) to such an employee who requests annual leave from Monday to Friday.
Sometimes employers feel that there is an “abuse” of this right on the part of employees, especially when employees request a leave of absence in weeks when they are scheduled to work fewer days. Then, when granting them annual leave, they are “taken off” from the size of their annual leave a smaller number of hours of leave than employees who work 4 hours each day, while both groups have the same amount of time off (vacation).
However, regardless of the feelings associated with this and the feeling that one group “loses” relative to the other, annual leave should be granted in the correct manner, i.e. on the employee’s working days, on an hourly basis.