In February of 1993, the Family and Medical Leave Act  was passed with bipartisan support. (Those were the good old days, hey?) Its purpose is to ensure  that workers should be able to recover from major illnesses, help ill relatives, or care for new babies without fear of losing their jobs.  In the twenty years since its passage, the Act has helped many employees manage through difficult family circumstances without fear of losing their jobs.  It has also presented employers with the challenge of monitoring employee absences carefully to avoid the risks associated with failures to comply with the Act.

Per the Department of Labor, the key provisions of the Act are as follow:

The FMLA entitles eligible employees of covered employers to take unpaid, job-protected leave for specified family and medical reasons with continuation of group health insurance coverage under the same terms and conditions as if the employee had not taken leave. Eligible employees are entitled to:

I recently sat down with my colleagues Toni Kellam and Todd Black, to talk about how the FMLA impacts organizations and what changes we might expect in the future in the provisions of the FMLA.  Toni is our in house expert on absence management and has worked with hundreds  of our clients to help them design appropriate absence management programs.  Todd is an expert in human resource management systems, and likewise has worked with many Kronos customers to enable their policies via workforce management technology.  I asked Toni and Todd to respond to the following questions.

You can hear their answers in this FMLA podcast.

If you want to learn more about the FMLA, the following links are helpful:

How well does your organization perform when it comes to tracking employee absences?

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