Two posts in one week about interference with Family and Medical Leave Act rights. The FMLA prohibits employers from interfering with, restraining, or denying the exercise of FMLA rights. On Wednesday, we discussed how an employer doesn’t interfere with FMLA when it does not provide FMLA leave to an employee…
Articles Posted in Family and Medical Leave
The FMLA does not require clairvoyance
“Clairvoyance,” that’s a 10th-grade word. Let me Google it just in case. Ok, we’re good. We’re taught, and by “we,” I mean our managers. And by “taught,” I mean “cross our fingers that they were paying attention during training,” that an employee does not need to say the words “Family…
Five ways that employers botch FMLA for mental health conditions (and how to get it right instead)
May is Mental Health Month. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, which enforces the Family and Medical Leave Act, just dropped some additional resources for workers on their rights to take leave for serious mental health conditions and for employers to better understand how to comply with…
Why did this company seemingly offer FMLA leave to an employee it planned to fire?
Last night, I went through my Google Drive of older cases about which I had intended to blog but never gotten around to it. And I found this Fifth Circuit Family and Medical Leave Act decision involving a company that fired an employee two months into his leave. The issue…
195,000 reasons to remember that state family leave laws don’t always track the FMLA
If you operate a business in a state that has a family and medical leave law, be careful when that state law does not overlap precisely with the Family and Medical Leave Act. For example, in New Jersey, a/k/a the California of the East, an employee can get job-protected leave…
Sorry, no, employers cannot unilaterally reduce FMLA leave entitlements below 12 weeks
“Oh, word?” — none of you, hopefully. The Family and Medical Leave Act states that an eligible employee “shall be entitled to a total of twelve workweeks of leave during any twelve-month period” for several qualifying reasons. When I look up the word “shall” in the dictionary, it says, “used…
The lengths to which some will go to get FMLA leave — like faking pregnancy. . . three times
(Allegedly.) Three lies and no baby. According to a Georgia Office of the Inspector General (OIG), a state employee informed HR that she was pregnant in October 2020. Seven months later, in May 2021, she announced that she had given birth. The employer later received an email from an individual claiming…
From the archives: 🔎Your post-Super Bowl guide to spotting employee FMLA or other sick leave abuse🔍
I had this great post planned for today about the millions of American workers who skip work the day after the Super Bowl — and what employers can do (legally) to address it. Then, I remembered that I wrote about it back in 2020. So, since I’m feeling lazy pragmatic,…
What the heck is ‘bleisure’ and how could your company get sued over it?
People ask me if I like to read. Not so much anymore, outside of reading Harry Potter books to my kids and reading graphic novels (ok, fine, comic books) to me. Social media apps like LinkedIn have eroded my attention span. I can barely make it through a few hundred…
Is this the worst batch of retaliatory emails I’ve ever read? Maybe.
Print this post if you want to discourage your managers and supervisor from putting dumb sh*t in emails that might one day get shown to a jury and end up costing your business a mint. Last night, I read this opinion from a federal judge in Wisconsin. It’s about an…