In June 2019, 54 current and former firefighters employed by the City of Morgantown, West Virginia sued the City regarding their compensation for legal holidays under § 10a of West Virginia Code. The Legislature adopted § 10a to provide firefighters with “enhanced benefits.” It provides that if a firefighter is required to either “work during a legal holiday,” or if the legal holiday falls on the firefighter’s regular scheduled day off, then the City must provide extra compensation to the firefighter. The parties agreed that, under § 10a, the City chooses the form of extra compensation; it may compensate a firefighter with either “equal time off” or by the payment of extra wages “at a rate not less than one and one-half times his or her regular rate of pay.”
However, in calculating firefighters’ legal holiday pay, the City did not look to the actual hours worked by a firefighter. Instead, at the beginning of each year, the City provided each firefighter with 12 hours of leave per legal holiday to use at his or her discretion. As a result, a firefighter who worked on a legal holiday for eight hours and a firefighter who worked 16 hours would each receive 12 hours of leave time at the beginning of each year. The compensation system also failed to account for firefighters working overtime on a legal holiday.
The firefighters asserted that, under § 10a, the City was required to compensate firefighters for the entire legal holiday – that is, for 24 hours of time off (or, alternatively, 24 hours of pay at time-and-a-half) rather than the 12 hours per legal holiday which the City provided.
The circuit court rejected the firefighters’ argument, but also rejected the City’s claim that it had fairly compensated the Firefighters by automatically affording them 12 hours of leave time for every legal holiday at the beginning of the year, irrespective of the firefighter’s schedule. The Firefighters appealed to the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, which agreed and reversed the decision below, finding that the City was required to pay firefighters for 24 hours per legal holiday.
The Court reasoned that, “by adopting § 10a, the Legislature clearly intended to provide firefighters with compensation for time that they worked, or were regularly scheduled off, ‘during a legal holiday.’ Accordingly, we hold that, under § 10a, firefighters are entitled to either additional pay or time off, as chosen by their employer, for each legal holiday equal to the hours worked during the holiday or, when a legal holiday falls on a firefighter’s regular scheduled day off, for the hours that he or she would have worked.”
Nicewarner v. City of Morgantown, 894 S.E.2d 902 (W.V., 2023).