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Q.) An employee who is eligible for Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) leave has asked to use it to spend time with her father, who is in a nursing home but having difficulty settling in. He has dementia and will listen only to family members. Is this a qualifying event? She would not be the […]
On March 14, 2019, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) issued a new opinion letter addressing whether an employer may delay designating paid leave as Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) leave. The issue often arises when employees who need time off ask to use their paid leave first and advise the employer that they […]
While binge-watching everyone’s nostalgic guilty pleasure, Netflix’s Stranger Things, I could not help but empathize with single mother Joyce Byers (played by actress Winona Ryder). Her prepubescent son, Will (Noah Schnapp), was abducted by a monster (the Demogorgon) and sent to a parallel universe (the Upside Down) populated by dog-like monsters. During Will’s disappearance, apparent […]
In my opinion, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) remains one of the most (if not the most) difficult employment laws to administer. The federal regulations are lengthy and detail-oriented, setting forth various compliance deadlines, rules, and (of course) exceptions.
The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides job-protected leave benefits. This generally means that when an employee qualifies for and takes FMLA leave, his or her job (or an equivalent) must be available to return to at the end of the leave period.
American Idol alum Jordin Sparks walked the red carpet just three days after giving birth to her son and has done a slew of interviews discussing this new chapter of her life. While Sparks is certainly a trooper for bouncing back so quickly after a major medical event and putting herself back into the celebrity […]
I played basketball in high school and dreamed of playing in college. I knew it was a long shot, and it never came to pass. “Maybe I’ll walk on some day,” I thought as I went off to college. Yeah, right. I gave up that dream when I enrolled at Wake Forest in the early- […]
As we previously reported, last June the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) announced that it would reinstate the use of Opinion Letters, an interpretive practice that had been replaced by the issuance of Administrator Interpretations during the Obama years.
A federal court in Louisville, Kentucky recently changed its mind and reinstated claims that had previously been dismissed. The court found an employee’s complaint contained sufficient allegations of discrimination based on her disability and her use of medical leave to move forward toward trial.
Most employers know they cannot retaliate against someone for requesting or using Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) leave. One way to defeat an FMLA retaliation claim is to provide evidence that the adverse employment decision was made, but not yet relayed to the employee, before she requested FMLA leave.