Your employee, Thelma, has requested FMLA leave to take her mom, Louise, to regular doctor appointments. Though the appointment itself will take one hour, Thelma wants to schedule it in the middle of the workday and for a total of five hours. The travel, she says, takes “quite a bit of time . . .
Week after week, it seems, a new city or state enacts its own paid leave law of some sort.
For employers obligated to comply with the federal FMLA and these local leave laws, it’s death by a thousand paper cuts.
These paid leave laws come in all shapes and sizes. Many of them permit leave
Earlier this year, the Department of Labor made clear in an opinion letter that neither an employee nor an employer may decline FMLA leave where an eligible employee is absent for an FMLA-qualifying reason. As the DOL noted in this March 2019 opinion letter, this is particularly true even where the employee would prefer that
If I gave you a million tries, you’d never guess that the next Department of Labor FMLA opinion letter would answer the question [wait for it . . .]: Is an employee’s attendance at a child’s IEP meeting covered by the FMLA?
The Answer? Yes. Most definitely, yes.
In an opinion
Every one of you employs at least one of these employees — you know, the one who:
He might even get indignant, insisting that the law allows him
Last June, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that it would again issue opinion letters to assist employers and employees in interpreting laws like the FMLA and Fair Labor Standards Act. It was a welcome change as far as the employer community was concerned.
Then we waited.
And waited.
Finally, the day came: April