A school superintendent returns from FMLA leave to find herself barred from the building and placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation that, she alleges, never actually happened. A federal appeals court just held that’s enough to state an FMLA retaliation claim.
It didn’t take a formal leave request. It didn’t take a doctor’s note. One email asking for FMLA forms was enough to trigger retaliation protection.
A 19-year employee couldn’t reach his FMLA administrator. The phone system hung up on callers at 5 p.m. An HR rep told him not to worry. Then he was fired for dishonest FMLA reporting.
Three administrations, multiple rules, and still no settled federal standard on joint employment. The DOL’s new proposed rule is the latest attempt to end that uncertainty.
An employee returned from his third round of FMLA leave and found a performance improvement plan waiting for him. That looks terrible. But a jury will never hear about it.
Some employment cases hinge on timing, comparators, or complicated workplace dynamics. This one was simpler. A resident skipped work for a job interview and then sent what his supervisors viewed as a contemptuous email when asked about it. Continue reading
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: it’s the Monday after the Super Bowl, an employee with approved intermittent FMLA leave asks for a personal day, gets denied, switches to FMLA, and later finds himself terminated for “abuse.”
That is not a hypothetical. It is essentially what happened in a recent decision out of the Southern District of West Virginia, where a federal court refused to throw out an employee’s FMLA retaliation claim and sent the case to a jury. Continue reading
Governor Murphy just expanded the New Jersey Family Leave Act. It reads cleanly in the statute. It reads a little differently once you try to apply it to real people and real leave requests.
These amendments are not cosmetic. They expand coverage, accelerate employee eligibility, and formally connect NJFLA to New Jersey’s paid-leave system. For employers, this is a structural change in how leave has to be managed. Continue reading
Two different HR questions triggered two formal FMLA opinion letters this week – and both answers will feel uncomfortably familiar to the employers they affect.
On January 5, 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division issued six new opinion letters in total, addressing a mix of FMLA and FLSA issues. One addresses a routine leave-administration issue faced by virtually all employers; the other zeroes in on a recurring leave-accounting problem unique to school employers. This post covers the two FMLA letters and kicks off a three-part series unpacking what employers should take from the full batch. Neither answer here is surprising. Both are easy to get wrong. Continue reading
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