USU employees will now be paid bi-monthly
Waiting a full month for a paycheck won’t be a problem for USU workers much longer.
Instead of university employees receiving their hard-earned money on the sixth day of the month, it will soon be available on the 10th and 25th of each month. This change is specifically for “wage hourly” employees who do not receive staff benefits of health insurance, sick/annual leave or retirement. Most of these employees are students, but do not include graduate assistants.
“The change in payment procedure is to help the students out,” said Dave Cowley, associate vice president, who said he has high hopes that this change will be a positive one.
Jennifer Reece, a sophomore and USU employee, describes the new policy as “super rad.” She agrees with Cowley that it will assist students with their finances and not living so much paycheck to paycheck.
Cowley said his only concern is for the payroll workers. It is quite a lot of work to get everybody paid, and doing it twice a month will be more time-consuming and harder work for them.
To efficiently and correctly process the twice-a-month payments, direct deposit will become mandatory. The payroll faculty are requesting that employees not using direct deposit should submit the authorization form as soon as possible to ensure the proper routing of payroll wages to their bank account prior to the implementation of the policy.
Cowley said there are many benefits to direct deposit, one of them being that it is just one less thing that the average student needs to take care of. He said the majority of the wage-hourly employees are already on direct deposit, so it shouldn’t be an issue for most of the students.
Kortney Teiger, a junior employee, says, “I don’t think it’s a big deal – its way more convenient to have direct deposit. You can keep track of your money better and pay bills easier.”
There is still some work that needs to be done on getting the system started. There is also some practice of inputting different work hours for the staff that needs to be achieved as well. The faculty in charge of the policy look forward to bringing it about and will keep let students know the exact date that it will be implemented.
-freck@cc.usu.edu