Which Federal Laws Cover Family and Medical Leave?
The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), is the primary federal law protecting the right to take family or medical leave without losing your job, health insurance benefits, or suffering from retaliation. The FMLA guarantees an employee, male or female, who has been working at least a year for a company with 50 or more employees the right to job-protected, 12-week, unpaid leave to recover from a serious medical condition or to care for a newborn, a newly adopted child, or a seriously ill child, parent or spouse. The FMLA guarantees that at the end of the leave you will be given the same job you left or another job equivalent in pay, benefits, and other terms and conditions. During the leave, the employer is required to maintain your health insurance benefits if it would have if you hadn’t taken leave. The purpose of the FMLA is to allow employees to balance their work and family life by taking reasonable unpaid leave for certain family and medical reasons.
Other federal laws that may also protect you when requesting a family or medical leave are Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which includes the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Title VII makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex, which includes pregnancy discrimination, and may protect employees who wish to take leave for pregnancy-related reasons. The ADA makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of disability, and may protect employees who wish to take leave for disability-related reasons.
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Courtesy of Workplace Fairness. For more information regarding the article, visit http://www.workplacefairness.org/family-leave
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