Schrodinger's Pto, Is It Legal?

Location: CO

Our office wants to get overhead charges down for the month of December and has advised us that we have to use our PTO instead of charging to overhead. For clarity, most of our work is charged to whichever project we are working on, but when we have non-project work or are waiting for work to drop in our inbox we charge that time to overhead. The type of work I do is administrative in nature but I can't do anything until it's assigned to me by another department and there is no way to know when work will be coming my way so some downtime is to be expected. Some days I'm busy for the full 8hrs I'm there, and sometimes I'm sitting around for 6 hours staring at my inbox. It's important to know that I'm not free to do whatever I want during this downtime. I can't go run errands or take a nap. I'm expected to remain at my desk in the office and be available to instantly work on anything that drops in my inbox. This isn't some on-call or contract gig, I'm a full time hourly employee with set work hours.

With this whole "no overhead" thing going on I am both at work and on PTO depending on how quickly work drops for me and I'm expected to share my workload with a coworker whose job is mainly non-project related so they can keep their billability up this month. As I said, I don't know when work is going to drop and we have to charge our time in 30 min increments, so at the end of the day, if I have accrued 30 min or more of downtime I'm supposed to use my PTO instead of billing it to overhead. Again, while I'm waiting for this work to drop, I am physically at my desk in the office.

They did say that they would advance all of next years PTO on January 1st to any employee who would face hardships by using their PTO now, but that means they wouldn't accrue new PTO in 2026. My supervisor tried to break it down so it made sense by saying if we were only 50% billable for the rest of December (a very real possibility) that means we would each be using 100 hrs of PTO and on Jan 1st we would have all of our 2026 PTO available to us and that would be a fair tradeoff. I reminded him that I just took a week of vacation over Thanksgiving and only had 62 hrs of PTO remaining for the year. If I had to use 100hrs of PTO this month I would not be carrying those 62 hrs over. I would instead have to deduct 38 hrs of PTO from my 2026 allotment and after taking my daughter on her annual spring break trip to see her grandparents in another state, I would have to hoard whatever PTO remained for the year in case I got sick or had appointments. Make that make sense!

This is an entirely new experience for me and I've been working in this industry (for other companies) for almost 20 years now. When my last company wanted to get PTO accruals down (some people rarely took PTO and unused PTO carries over to the next year. Same as my current job), they just told each department that anyone with over X hours of PTO needed to take enough vacation time over the next month or two to get their hours down to whatever their new cap was and the cap was never less than 80 hours. That kind of mandated PTO usage I can understand because we are expected to not work during that time. What my current company is doing however, doesn't seem legal. Is it?