The New York Times-20080125-Labor Dept- Working on Changes for Families Coping With Illness and Military Duty
Return to: The_New_York_Times-20080125
Labor Dept. Working on Changes for Families Coping With Illness and Military Duty
Labor Department officials said on Thursday that they had proposed new regulations that address some corporate complaints that workers are abusing the Family and Medical Leave Act.
Under the proposals, workers would generally have to call in to request a leave before taking it; currently, employees can take off for two days before requesting a leave.
The Family and Medical Leave Act gives employees at workplaces with 50 or more workers the right to take up to 12 unpaid weeks a year to cope with their own serious health conditions or to care for a newborn, a newly adopted child or a seriously ill child, spouse or parent.
The Labor Department said it was also drafting regulations to put into effect important changes that Congress approved this month to leaves for the families of wounded veterans. Under the Defense Authorization Act, which awaits President Bush's signature, family members would be allowed to take up to six months of unpaid leave to care for wounded military personnel.
The defense act would also let workers take up to 12 weeks off for any qualifying exigency related to a family member's call-up to active duty or deployment. These changes are the first in the leave act since it was passed in 1993.
Anything that will ease the burden of these families is welcome, said Nancy Lessin, a co-founder of Military Families Speak Out. It's good that people won't lose their jobs when they're dealing with these horrible situations that will often last a lifetime.
Victoria A. Lipnic, the assistant labor secretary for employment standards, said the proposed changes were modest and did not go as far as the business community had hoped.
One of corporate America's biggest complaints was that many workers with chronic conditions, like asthma or migraine headaches, took frequent, unscheduled leaves without notice.
Many business groups had urged the Labor Department to narrow the definition of serious health conditions, because they believed that many workers were taking leaves for minor illnesses. But department officials said they had decided against tightening the definition, saying it should be done by Congress.
We did not think that we should be rendering ineligible people who have health conditions and are currently eligible under the law, Ms. Lipnic said.
The department estimates that seven million Americans take leaves each year under the law.
Marc Freedman, director of labor law policy for the United States Chamber of Commerce, said: There's a problem with how the department has defined serious health conditions because that has opened things up to virtually any conditions now being eligible. We would have liked to see changes there.
Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, said it was hard to comment because the Labor Department had not released the text of the changes. On Thursday, the department sent the regulations to the Office of Management and Budget with the hope that they would be approved and published in the next few weeks. The public will have 60 days to comment.
We know from anecdotal experience and from the research we've done that the law is working well for employers and employees, Ms. Ness said. There was no reason to go beyond making some minor changes. Instead of cutting back on protections, we should be building on the law and extending protections further.
She complained that the act did not cover 40 percent of workers, including part-time workers and those at small companies.
Under the new proposals permitting companies to require that workers call in to request leave before they take it, there will be exceptions for extenuating circumstances, like when a worker is too ill to call in.
Ms. Lipnic said the proposed regulations sought to clear up medical certification procedures that often led to disagreements over whether workers had done enough to show they qualified for leaves.
She said the proposed regulations would allow companies to require doctors to recertify annually that a worker has a serious health condition. Under current rules, doctors can provide a multiyear certification that a worker has a serious condition.
