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Are you Prepared for the New FMLA Changes?

President Bush has just signed into law changes to the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) that may put HR departments into sticky situations regarding long–term leaves of absence.

As enacted 15 years ago, the FMLA requires companies to provide its employees up to 12 weeks off in each 12–month period for personal illnesses, the birth or adoption of a child or the care of seriously ill children, spouses or parents.

Effective immediately, the act now requires companies to provide employees with up to 26 weeks of unpaid leave per year for the care of a spouse, child or parent who becomes ill or is injured while on active duty in the military.

Another pending change would require companies to provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid “exigency” leave per year to attend to unforeseen situations arising from a relation’s active duty or call to active duty. This change is pending the Department of Labor’s definition of a qualifying exigency.

The changes to the law come with little formal guidance from the federal government and have left many HR departments wondering how to comply with them.

Who decides what is a serious illness or injury requiring an extended leave of absence—the employee, the military, the HR department? How does an HR department ask about the illness without seeming unsympathetic or unpatriotic?

Beyond notifying your employees, has your HR department formulated a plan to comply with the changes to the law? If not, it’s something to start thinking about.

Find out more about the amendments to the FMLA and download a copy of the law, as amended, on the U.S. Department of Labor’s website under the section for the Wage and Hour Division of the Employment Standards Administration. To find out more about what the changes mean, visit the Society for Human Resource Management website at www.shrm.org.