Though the employee's husband did spend nearly four weeks being involved in the healing ministry, "nearly half of the trip was spent not in faith healing, but visiting friends, family, and local churches" (FEPG).
The bottom line is that the FMLA won't permit employees to take leave when it is a vacation with a "seriously ill spouse" -- even if caring for the spouse is an "incidental consequence" of bringing him along on a vacation. Not only was the employee's claim for unfairness vis-a-vis FMLA denied, her petition for "associational discrimination" in violation of the ADA was not approved as well.
The FMLA was a politically hot potato even before the presidential election of 1992. The first two versions of FMLA were vetoed by George Harold Walker Bush, and during the 1992 presidential election, candidates Bill Clinton and Bob Dole debated the merits of the proposed legislation. In the end Clinton won the election and the bill became law in 1993. But is the FMLA everything it is cracked up to be? According to the Mother Jones (Mencimer, 2008) the law is "incomplete. It does nothing for people who simply can't afford to take unpaid leave" (Mencimer).
Moreover, Mencimer goes on, the law leaves out "40% of the workforce, including millions of workers employed by companies with fewer than 50 employees in a 75-mile radius." It also leaves out part time workers and "strangely, flight attendants," Mencimer goes on. In the industrialized world, only the United States does not provide paid maternity leave, Mencimer asserts. That leaves the U.S. "on a par with such nations as Liberia and Swaziland," the writer goes on. And during the George W. Bush administration Bush attempted to "quietly…gut the law through the regulatory process" but did not succeed in that effort.
The conservative United States Chamber of Commerce has "relentlessly attacked the popular law" calling it an "expensive" burden on companies "rife with abuse" (Mencimer). And Republicans have tried to obstruct every attempt to expand FMLA. Apparently the Department of Labor under George W. Bush tried to push through new regulations that would "…make it easier for employers to deny leave requests," Mencimer writes. The regulations would also have allowed the employer of a company to "directly quiz an employee's doctor" as to the seriousness of his or her medical condition. However, those regulations did not become law, and as of 2010, if an employer wishes to contact a physician about a request for leave from an employee, that employee must give permission for the employer to contact his or her doctor. Moreover, the employer must have a medical professional -- not the boss -- make contact with the doctor.
One can imagine a supervisor who doesn't want the employee to take leave contacting the doctor and bullying that doctor into admitting that it was not truly a "serious health condition."
During the presidential campaign of 2008, candidate Obama consistently said he was in favor of expanding the Family and Medical Leave legislation, according to Mother Jones. In fact when Obama was elected to the United States Senate, he hired Karen Kornbluh, who was previously the director of the Work and Family Program at the New America Foundation, as his policy director. Kornbluh's "fingerprints...
Family Medical Leave Act gives the right to eligible employees to get unpaid and job protected leave from their employers for their family and medical reasons. According to FMLA if employees are eligible then they can take 12 workweeks leaves in a year. Employees take these leave if they are facing serious health problems. Under this Act employers are required to give unpaid leave to employees for family and medical
FMLA Family Medical Leave Act Under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993, 29 U.S.C.S. § 2611-2654, certain employees are guaranteed up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave per year in order to attend to personal medical problems or medical problems experienced by certain eligible members of their family. In order to be an eligible employee under qualify under § 2611, an employee must have worked for at least 12
One reason for the lack of impact, according to the study, is that few employees can afford to take advantage of the law's unpaid leave provisions ("Family Leave Act has little impact," 1994, p. 4) Not only do employers have to now contend with making sure they are following all of the regulations and rules under the FMLA, they too must deal with the increased number of court cases evident
" The same trend is occurring in the public sector though not as quickly and not on such a wide scale. Currently there are just under 300 colleges, 150 city and county governments and 13 state governments offering their employees domestic partner benefits that are equal to the benefits provided to their married employees. One of the benefits of including domestic partners in company benefit packages is that it helps to boost
FMLA Summary The author of this report has been asked to do a summary and review of what has come to be known as FMLA, which is short for the Family Medical Leave Act. Within this report there will be a review and summary of the relevant employment law. There will then be a construction of an overview of the law that includes a rationale for said law, who is affected
The already-begun and ongoing retirement of the so-called "Baby Boomer" generation already has many employers worried concerning the size and effectiveness of the workforce, and appropriate use of the Family Medical Leave Act is essential to ensure that the United States still has a large and energetic pool of workers available for employers (Brown 2005; Holmes 2008). The most obvious constraints on employees seeking leave under the Family Medical Leave
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