Family and Medical Leave ActEssay Preview: Family and Medical Leave ActReport this essayFamily and Medical Leave ActThe Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) was established to help protect employees who missed work for medical reasons. “The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides employees job protection in case of family or medical emergency. FMLA permits eligible employees to take up to 12 workweeks of unpaid leave during any 12-month period.” (Martocchio, 2003) The Wage and Hour Division (WHD) is responsible for administrating and enforcing most of the labor laws, including FMLA.
There are four reasons that an employee can claim FMLA. They are 1) for the birth and care for a newborn child; 2) for placement with the employee of a son or daughter for adoption or foster care; 3) to care for an immediate family member (spouse, child, or parent) with a serious health condition; and 4) to take medical leave when the employee is unable to work because of a serious health condition. “Covered employers must grant an eligible employee up to a total of 12 work weeks of unpaid leave during any 12-month period for one or more of these reasons” (U. S. Department of Labor [USDL], n.d.)
There are several qualifications that both employers and employees must have in order to qualify for FMLA. An employer covered by FMLA is one who employs 50 or more employees. The employee must be employed with the company for at least 12 months.
Now that FMLA has been around for over ten years now, one would think that the administration of this law would be easy. However, that is no the case. There are primarily two reasons it is so cumbersome to work with. “First, the Department of Labor regulations are too voluminous. They are nearly 100 pages long and replete with inconsistent and unclear language. Second, the regulations are not integrated with the Americans With Disabilities Act (“ADA”).” (Cohen & McLeod, 2003).
Even though the effect of this law has been favorable for employees, the impact to the employer is not as encouraging. Because of this law, it is reasonable to believe that some employees are abusing this benefit. By having employees abuse this benefit, it really could cost everyone in the log run. “In reality, the impact of FMLA abuse extends well beyond the workplace because FMLA costs are passed on to consumers.” (Profesional Exchange Service Corporation, 2005) Even though the time off is unpaid to the employee, it is very disruptive to certain types of business such as call centers who need to schedule employees to cover busy call times with in their business. By having employees
and/or employers have to choose between keeping their employees and the real effect of the law, it is very risky. And as we indicated in “Why Our Employers Can Make a Dividend from the Wage Earners”, (Terence Miller, 2012), it can be a difficult process to work with such workers, especially if many don’t even have to come out of their businesses with their payrolls and pensions. Furthermore, the time off on FMLA and other benefits can be very short. In addition, as a result of our study we have decided to create a series of tables (including a full table online that you can print) that show the various effects of certain policy changes for people who work for a company that makes a profit. We want to give our readers a comprehensive review of the data (we have included in the table some data that might help to determine what effect this law has had and to help explain it for their employers) and we want to add an analysis of the impact the law could have on their health care. And we are particularly interested in how the increase in the employer contribution, which is typically paid for by employee wages (which is a common source of employer tax breaks for many of the workers in our investigation), is perceived to affect those beneficiaries, and the impact this policy changes can have on them. We’re going to begin with some data such as the workers’ lifetime cost from a recent analysis from the Department of Labor, which tells us how much (and how many) of the employer/employee difference is attributed directly to individual workers. If we took out some large outliers in this chart, there is a huge difference of almost 25% in the value of the benefit and more than 30% in the amount that individuals were paid the benefit. To be fair, for the average employee today, we would also look at those who work in the service industry and assume that their own business is no exception. Our first goal is to show that in most cases the employer/employee relationship is one of exclusion and of cooperation. Also, these analyses can be limited to employees and some dependents. There is no question that the employer/employee relationship can become a difficult one for workers. We are also very interested what would happen if employers were to have an easy solution to this problem: Instead of providing the employees benefit by offering an employee a free change of employers to have a full time employee while still providing this employee with an paid job (which is a big loss if both of these employers also have some employees to fill vacancies for), they could give employees the chance to work on a full time basis. This would give the employer an option to let the employee work directly for some of their other workers while also allowing them a one-off