If you are an hourly employee, can your employer make you work 40 hours and be paid for only 32? Not a union shop.

One of the ways they could make it legal would be to announce that everyone in the company will be receiving a 20% cut in pay, which is what 40 hours at a 32 hour pay rate would come out to. They would have to adjust your hourly or weekly (if you're salary) rate to reflect this. But if it comes down to a choice between a 20% pay cut or a 20% reduction in the workforce, I'd take the cut, because you don't know for sure if you're going to be in that remaining 80% or not. Your employer is simply trying to avoid layoffs and figures that this is the lesser of two evils, which is a good thing, because it means that they value all of you.

No, it is not legal. However, Laotion842 is correct. My employer cut our hours to 32/wk and also, suspended our yearly cost of living raise. Either way I am 23% poorer, but still employed with 3 days off!

I normaly work 40hrs plus overtime due to shotage of work we sometimes have to cut our hours
ie 1 day off which means ihave only worked 32hours . they calculate you must work 40 hrs before
overtime is paid which meens we loose 8hrs at overtime rate as we are only paid basic rate

We normaly work 40 plus overtime but due to lack of work we sometimes have to cut our days down to 4 haveing an unpaid day off .. when we are paid in my opinion our pay should read 32 hrs at basic
plus our overtime they say no it is calculated at 40 hrs plus overtime which means weare lossing 8 hours of overtime is this leagal