Yahoo Finance The Stickiest Points of Using Family and Medical Leave
The Family and Medical Leave Act took effect in 1993 to help employees balance medical demands with professional obligations. Under the federal law's provisions, eligible employees may take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave during one 12-month period for a serious health condition -- either their own or that of an immediate family member. At the end of that period, the law ensures employees are guaranteed a job upon returning to work. The FMLA also covers 12 weeks of parental leave for the birth or adoption of a child, and for bonding with a new foster child.
So that's what the law covers -- in theory.
In practice, requesting up to a quarter of a year off from your job can be fraught, and that's putting it mildly. Life's emergencies, when married with ignorance of the FMLA's finer points, could cause you to stumble through the assumed protocol for requesting time off at your job. That stumble you took could be right into a landmine, where you miscommunicate with your human resources department and supervisor, and therefore, receive pushback on your request for time away.
Here are some of the common FMLA snags you need to watch out for.
You might have thought your sister was an immediate family member, but ... The FMLA allows you to use this time of unpaid leave to care for an immediate family member with a serious health condition, but it defines immediate family as a spouse, child or parent. Is your grandma sick with no one else to look after her? Don't fret yet -- it's possible that you work in a state with different labor laws and definitions. "The FMLA is the basic standard, and no state can offer employees less, but each state can expand on the FMLA's policies," explains Marjorie Mesidor, a workplace discrimination attorney for the New York-based law firm Phillips & Associates. For instance, in Maine you may take job-protected leave to care for a sibling who lives with you. In the District of Columbia, you could take the time to care for any blood relative or a committed partner who you live with.
When it comes to paid time off, what your employer says goes. PTO is now standard in a reputable workplace's benefits package, so it's easy to forget that it's a worker's privilege, not his or her right. Each company has dominion over how and when paid time off is used, which could mean you'll have to use your accrued paid time off before taking leave under the FMLA. It could also mean that when you're ill, your employer might insist you take time under unpaid FMLA leave instead of using paid sick leave. "As long as your employer is compliant with their employee handbook and is uniformly enforcing these policies for all employees, then they can absolutely deny your request to take sick leave [using PTO]," Mesidor says.
The caveat is that your employer can't require you to use accrued paid time off concurrently with FMLA leave. "The FMLA is job protection for taking 12 weeks of unpaid leave," Mesidor explains. "It's separate from whatever paid-leave policies your employer provides. So let's say a woman is away because she delivered a baby, and her employer tells her she has to use paid time off at the same time as the government's ensured unpaid FMLA time. The FMLA already protected her job for 12 weeks without pay. For an employer to make her use paid time for that same time period is basically [the employer] telling her that she's less entitled to her sick leave or vacation days than other employees [who aren't away on FMLA]."
If you and your spouse work for the same employer, you really need to read the law's fine print. Let's say you and your spouse are expecting a baby and work for the same employer. You're both eligible to take FMLA, so you'd both like to take off at the same time, using the maximum amount of government-ensured job-protected leave to bond with your child. Here's the catch: The maximum amount of time is a combined total of 12 weeks in a 12-month period, so six weeks each (or maybe four weeks and eight weeks, respectively, or whatever other combination equal to 12 weeks that you choose), but taken at the same time. According to the FMLA regulations, this limitation also applies to spouses who work at two different branches that are located 75 miles or more apart.
There is a small glimmer of silver lining: You and your spouse are still individually entitled to the difference in FMLA time you couldn't use when you were out on leave together. So if you took six weeks of FMLA leave to bond with a child with your spouse, but then you need to take six weeks later for a serious health condition, you're entitled to that time.
You need to calculate intermittent leave to the letter, er, hour. "It's especially important that workers away on intermittent leave keep track of that time," says Bruce Elliott, manager of compensation and benefits for the Society for Human Resource Management. Here's why: Only the amount of time taken counts toward the employee's leave entitlement under FMLA, down to the minute, but the leave is calculated by dividing the amount of time taken each week by the number of hours you normally work. For example, if you take FMLA leave for four hours, two days a week to go to chemotherapy, that's recorded as one-fifth of a week for an employee who normally works 40 hours.
Also keep in mind ...
Even if you know all that's above, you should note these four additional tips so your FMLA leave request runs smoothly.
1. Become best friends with your employee handbook. Read it cover to cover the first day, and return to it regularly. Also sit down with your workplace's HR personnel to ask questions about those policies.
2. Keep a paper trail. If you're anticipating you'll need leave, Elliott recommends you start your own FMLA file, stocked with certification forms from doctors, attorneys, adoption records and copies of birth certificates. Also file workplace correspondence. "Get everything in writing from your employer," Mesidor says.
3. Bookmark your state's leave policies. Labor laws are nuanced, and depending on where you work you could have less-stringent eligibility requirements for taking time off or even be eligible for paid family and medical leave. The National Conference of State Legislatures website offers an overview of family and medical leave laws by state.
4. Know the difference between an efficient HR department and a backward one. It's a pain to tussle with paperwork as you're juggling the stress of a new child or an illness, but you really do want your human resources department to be diligent. "HR isn't the Policy Police," Elliott says. "It's part of the job to manage risk for the organization, but part of why we ask for the documentation or request that forms be filled out is to ensure FMLA is applied evenly and fairly throughout the organization."
You do need to be sensitive to whether your workplace is toxic. "There's a difference between doing what makes business sense and what's illegal," Mesidor explains. "HR departments have a job to do, but they're your colleagues and should also be treating you like a human being."
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