Posted on Jul 16, 2019
Where can I find guidance on how many days a soldier should be allowed off versus required to work?
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I just started my first command as a TPU. I want to leverage orders and RMA/ADA/ATAs etc to ensure my soldiers feel like they have been compensated adequately. Additionally, I'd like to avoid working for free as a TPU. As a reservist I feel like it is very common for leaders to expect soldiers to give their time off with no compensation. This is an unrealistic expectation in my opinion and I want to be able to pay my soldiers as much as I am legally able in addition to making sure I put an appropriate monetary value on my commitments to my unit when I am away from the office. Are there any regulations or guidance that discuss remote work for soldiers? What about bringing a soldier in for 7 days of orders and only making them work 5. As an example, let's say I want to bring a soldier into work for a week but the soldier is out of RMA days, ATA days, etc. The only way I can bring them in would be on orders. Dual ATAs pay more than a single day of orders so financially, it is less lucrative for the soldier to participate and discourages them from wanting to come into the unit voluntarily (especially if their civilian job pays more). As a commander, can (and should) I bring a soldier in on orders for 7 days and give them two days off? Often times it seems that soldiers on ECT are expected to work for 14 days with maybe 1 or 2 days off the entire ECT. In my opinion, soldiers should be granted 2 days off per week unless absolutely necessary for operational reasons. Would it be reasonable to put a soldier on orders Monday through Sunday and give them 2 days off somewhere in that stretch? Effectively getting them paid for 7 days versus 5. The reserve pay system is weird because active duty folks get 2.5 days paid leave per month. Double ATAs sound nice but don't include BAH or BAS... so in my opinion it's almost even when doing those.
Posted in these groups: 
Army Reserve Unit Administrator
Company Commander
Battalion Commander
Military Pay
Drill
Army Reserve Unit Administrator Company Commander Battalion Commander Military Pay Drill
Edited 5 y ago
Posted 5 y ago
Responses: 4
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Sir, this is a local command policy. All orders have to be approved by BN and above. Each BN has a budgeted amount of days. I was a TPU commander at a MCT for a spell and I can say it was hard to get anything approved you have to have solid justification. As for allowing them days off that will be hard to approve and get anyone to buy off on. I have rarely seen any time off given other than a organizational day at the end of AT. I would say this is one of those as long as you are good with it and they are with-in driving distance then...
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AR 600-8-10 states it is based on local command policy. I know my units policy is you can’t have more than 4 days off with out have a DA-31.
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AR 135-91 and AR 600-8-6 will get you started on what you should know about paying TPUs.
Here is the bad news:
7 day orders with 2 days off: not likely, for several reasons.
Leave is an entitlement on active duty orders, not for orders 29 days or less. A local commander can authorize a pass, but if you plan on trying to get just 7 day orders that cover a weekend, somewhere between unit and approval level, those will get shortened to just MON-FRI, because reserve components simply are not funded to give paid time off for TPU/MDAYS.
For this same reason, most commands only authorize alternate home station AT orders in three sets of MON-FRI orders, because there is no expectation for a TPU/MDAY to be at the unit on a weekend when the AGRs are not there.
RMA/ATA comes with the same rules as a drill UTA: minimum 4 hours duty, in uniform at the unit, or place of duty, except RMAs and ATAs are limited to one per day, unlike the UTA (MUTA and some codes of ATAs) that we can pay two per day for drills, which each come with a minimum 4 hours duty (min 8 total), in uniform, at the unit or place of duty.
Paying someone an RMA for something they did at home comes with the risk of relief for cause for fraud, and that's a risk assumed at O6 level or above, (In our case that risk was assumed by the CG only for RMA compensation for completing SSD).
The dirty truth is, there is no regulatory way to pay leaders for participating in teleconference command and staff meetings at night, or working on awards, evals or briefing products at home on their own time in the evenings or on weekends. That's the price that comes with the leadership position, just like it does on active duty; we give up some of our free time.
There is a way to award TPU/MDAYs a retirement point for a command and staff call and other remote work events, it's not much, but it still adds up to more financial compensation in retirement than the zero compensation we got on active duty for every late night C&S or QTB re-write, or writing NCOERs and awards at home after the kids go to bed, or spending your whole weekend writing up a training concept that someone asked for Friday night for a Monday morning suspense.
Long story short, the only real way to make it "fair compensation" for the majority of the TPU/MDAYs is to plan realistic expectations for every drill, RMA and set of orders so that all scheduled requirements can be completed by 1700 every day.
Here is the bad news:
7 day orders with 2 days off: not likely, for several reasons.
Leave is an entitlement on active duty orders, not for orders 29 days or less. A local commander can authorize a pass, but if you plan on trying to get just 7 day orders that cover a weekend, somewhere between unit and approval level, those will get shortened to just MON-FRI, because reserve components simply are not funded to give paid time off for TPU/MDAYS.
For this same reason, most commands only authorize alternate home station AT orders in three sets of MON-FRI orders, because there is no expectation for a TPU/MDAY to be at the unit on a weekend when the AGRs are not there.
RMA/ATA comes with the same rules as a drill UTA: minimum 4 hours duty, in uniform at the unit, or place of duty, except RMAs and ATAs are limited to one per day, unlike the UTA (MUTA and some codes of ATAs) that we can pay two per day for drills, which each come with a minimum 4 hours duty (min 8 total), in uniform, at the unit or place of duty.
Paying someone an RMA for something they did at home comes with the risk of relief for cause for fraud, and that's a risk assumed at O6 level or above, (In our case that risk was assumed by the CG only for RMA compensation for completing SSD).
The dirty truth is, there is no regulatory way to pay leaders for participating in teleconference command and staff meetings at night, or working on awards, evals or briefing products at home on their own time in the evenings or on weekends. That's the price that comes with the leadership position, just like it does on active duty; we give up some of our free time.
There is a way to award TPU/MDAYs a retirement point for a command and staff call and other remote work events, it's not much, but it still adds up to more financial compensation in retirement than the zero compensation we got on active duty for every late night C&S or QTB re-write, or writing NCOERs and awards at home after the kids go to bed, or spending your whole weekend writing up a training concept that someone asked for Friday night for a Monday morning suspense.
Long story short, the only real way to make it "fair compensation" for the majority of the TPU/MDAYs is to plan realistic expectations for every drill, RMA and set of orders so that all scheduled requirements can be completed by 1700 every day.
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CPT (Join to see)
If there’s risk of relief for cause over paying someone an RMA for remote work, obviously I won’t do that. What I will do however, is bring it up to my BC and seek to have a change of policy made. Soldiers on active duty get paid for their weekends as it is a salary job. I’ll run the numbers on this later but I think I’ve done an analysis before that showed me that the pay is roughly equal as long as TPUs aren’t worked over ever. However, reality is that they are expected to and should be compensated accordingly. Maybe I’m a maverick for saying this but I’m pretty serious about not giving my time away for free. When I dropped my 30 hours of my week at my civilian job to conduct CoC inventory, getting only 5 days of pay for doing what an AD soldier would get 7 days pay for stings. I was beginning to gather that what you have said is correct and if we truly must work within this framework, I will seek to change the framework or change the frame of expectations for my soldiers and myself. My mother has always told me that you teach people how to treat you. I’m nervous about bringing this topic up to my BC but maybe if I present it in a factual, non-emotional way, we can make things change.
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SGM (Join to see)
It's easy to fall into the false comparison that the active duty soldier gets paid for their weekends because its a "salary", but that is an apples-oranges comparison exactly because you are comparing a salaried job and a non-salaried job.
A TPU working 5 days is not getting shorted for not also getting paid for the weekend after putting in 5 days of duty when the work was complete on Friday. The active duty soldier is getting "paid for the weekend" because that's their fulltime job, all 52 weeks of the year, just like the TPU is getting "paid for the weekend" by whatever fulltime civilian job they have 52 weeks a year.
To put it another way; if you brought in a temp to cover a MON-FRI one week at your place of civilian employment, would you really expect to pay them for the following weekend off?
As far as trying to change things, MILPAY is not a framework or policy with exceptions, it's federal law further broken down into the DoD FMR and Army regulation.
A TPU working 5 days is not getting shorted for not also getting paid for the weekend after putting in 5 days of duty when the work was complete on Friday. The active duty soldier is getting "paid for the weekend" because that's their fulltime job, all 52 weeks of the year, just like the TPU is getting "paid for the weekend" by whatever fulltime civilian job they have 52 weeks a year.
To put it another way; if you brought in a temp to cover a MON-FRI one week at your place of civilian employment, would you really expect to pay them for the following weekend off?
As far as trying to change things, MILPAY is not a framework or policy with exceptions, it's federal law further broken down into the DoD FMR and Army regulation.
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