Pay overtime as vacation hours?

Questioner

After 10 years my employment was terminated due to the company stopping. The company falls under the CAO animal husbandry. I had an employment contract of 28 hours a week and had 140 vacation hours per year. Now I still had 122.5 unused vacation hours from the past three years and 145 extra worked hours (more hours). Now all those 267.5 hours have been paid out as vacation hours. According to my employer, you first take all the extra hours worked and then your vacation hours. This is not stated in my employment contract and I cannot find it in the collective labor agreement either. However, my employment contract does contain the sentence: Any extra hours worked will be compensated if possible by means of a time-for-time arrangement. While in my position it was not possible to also take those time-for-time hours. I asked my employer where I could find this information and got the following answer: 'That is not reflected, but it is also not that it is not the case. We have not explicitly discussed this in the past. But it is quite common that it is done time by time.' Can my employer pay out all these hours as vacation hours and can an employer decide that you first take all your extra hours worked and then your actual vacation hours. While there is nothing about this in your employment contract and collective labor agreement.

Lawyer

Paying overtime at the end of employment is certainly possible, but it is indeed always paid as special leave and not as normal wages. This also means that it is taxed differently. What your employer does is therefore factually correct. It is also customary that when recording hours, the hours of overtime are first used up, then the hours that expire first and finally the rest. The law does not provide an explicit answer to this, but the case law does. So what your employer did is correct.