Have you or a family member fallen seriously ill? Are you pregnant and/or expecting a new addition to the family through adoption or foster care? Under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), you could be entitled to up to 12 weeks of unpaid, protected leave from your job.
What is the FMLA?
Established in 1993, the FMLA was designed to help workers bridge the gap between the need to financially provide for their families and the more pressing desire to be there for their loved ones, by giving eligible employees the right to an extended period of time off, without the risk of losing their job.
Offering up to 12 weeks of leave per year to eligible employees (26 weeks for military or military caregivers), situations covered by the FMLA include:
- The care and birth of the worker’s newborn child;
- The addition of a new child to the household through adoption or foster care;
- The care of an immediate family member (spouse, child, or parent) with a serious medical condition;
- Medical leave for the employee’s own serious medical condition.
An equal opportunity act, the FMLA applies to all genders, all races, and all eligible employees, while to accommodate this belief, a recent 2015 Department of Labor ruling changed the definition of an employee’s “spouse” to include same-sex partners as well.
What Makes an Employee Eligible?
Law requires all elementary and secondary schools (both private and public), public agencies, and companies with over 50 employees located within 75 miles of the business to uphold FMLA standards. As such, any employee that has worked at least 12 months at any of the above establishments and has logged a minimum of 1,250 working hours, is eligible to received FMLA benefits.
It should be noted, however, that if an employee is absent from work for longer than 12 weeks, the employer has a legal right to fire or replace them.
Should any qualifying time off be taken by an employee for medical or family reasons, at the start of the next year the clock simply resets back to zero – making yet another 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave available if necessary.
(Shared with the use of this article by the U.S. Department of Labor.)
