Ena Wages served as a property manager for one of several apartment complexes owned by Stuart Management Corp. She began her employment on November 17, 2008, and this is significant under the FMLA because nearly one year later, on November 13, 2009, Ena’s physician restricted the number hours she could work as a result of
When it comes to leave as a reasonable accommodation after FMLA leave is exhausted, employers have been conditioned to simply believe: inflexible leave policies bad, flexible leave policies good. In fact, many of us have become so good at this conditioning it would make Ivan Pavlov proud [you know, the guy who conditioned
Here’s a shout out to all you employers out there who forget to send your employees the proper FMLA notices when they seek leave for a reason covered by the FMLA. Occasionally, the courts have your back, despite your lack of attention to detail.
As I have discussed before, when an employer is put
No matter what position the EEOC might take, I’ll always take the position that an employee’s regular, reliable attendance is an essential function of the job. So, when an employee wants to arrive at work at any time, without any repercussions, it’s not a reasonable accommodation under the ADA. And I have a recent court
Calling all FMLA nerds! You’ll want to read this.
Every February, the American Bar Association’s Federal Labor Standards Legislation Committee publishes a comprehensive report of significant FMLA decisions handed down by the federal courts in the previous year. This report literally includes every FMLA decision from 2013. This year’s report is as comprehensive as always
One of the most difficult issues an HR professional or in-house employment counsel faces is how to deal with an employee who cannot return to work after FMLA leave expires. Is additional leave required? What law applies and what are the obligations for an employer in this situation?
Despite the uncertainty of what additional leave
Kris was forced to endure the unthinkable: her daughter had just become the victim of a sexual assault.
In the weeks that followed, Kris alerted her employer of the assault and the care her daughter would require in the time ahead. Kris suffered too. As her doctor would later report, she had crying spells, a
Linette Williams-Grant had a week worthy of Judith Viorst’s classic children’s story Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, which (as an aside) is one of my all time favorites to read to my young children, particularly after a bad day.
How bad was Linette’s week? It started with her employer’s
Hello…hello…hello…is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone home?
Have your employees have become so evasive in their requests for medical leave that you feel like signing Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” to get them to talk? Have no fear — you don’t have to become
Unless you’ve been securely wedged under a rock over the past 24 hours, you know that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which had established a federal definition of marriage as a legal union only between one man and one woman.
Yesterday, as Justice Anthony Kennedy read