Direct Deposit error, or maybe not?

*taking a quick break from cramming a bunch of union terms. Days before exam: 6!!*

Last week at my part time job, many people were reporting that they were incorrectly applying their vacation for this coming week. I didn't think much of it, since I am part time and don't get vacation hours from this job. I checked anyway, and sure enough, there were 3 days of vacation applied on the online scheduling, bumping me from 8 hours worked to 38 hours. This system is correlated to the payroll system, so I ended up with 30hrs of extra pay.

Being the prudent HR person I am (and I'd hate to be behind any pay error), I talked to my manager on Saturday, since HR was long gone on Friday by the time I got to work. Apparently, I've had vacation available to me. Reason for this is that I am grandfathered into "the plan". Or so my manager explained it to me, but he was just relieved he didnt mess up payroll.

Now, that's great! I have 30 hours of legitimate vacation pay to throw into my car-fund goal, PLUS 50 hours of accrued and unused vacation. Bad news? How the heck long has this been going on?!! At this PT job, you can only carry over 1 year's worth of vacation. So in theory, I've been losing vacation pay for over 6 years. Can you tell why I'm not a happy camper? Of course, I know that it is not illegal as vacation pay isn't mandatory compensation (exam item!), to some degree. I do remember asking about vacation pay about 4 years ago, but I was told I did not qualify, which came to no surprise. I asked because the payroll system kept accruing it anyway.

I have a call in to HR tomorrow to further discuss what the heck just happened. It was supposed to be today, but I am so behind processing open enrollment that I didn't even eat my lunch or take a break. Lots of coffee, though. PT job's HR dept is painfully unorganized, so I can only imagine how the conversation will go... I guess my priority tomorrow is to 1) re-verify I am eligible for vacation pay (since this would affect about 3-4 other part time employees who like me have been there forever, and my manager could've been wrong in assuming I have vacation pay) and 2) what they plan on doing about this mis-communication and all these lost years of vacation. I guess this is a To Be Continued post!