If you’ve never requested a second FMLA medical opinion, you’re not alone. Most employers haven’t. A Seventh Circuit case decided last month is a useful illustration of how that process works and why the details matter. This is the second post from that case — yesterday’s covered the FMLA falsification and transgender discrimination angles.
A bus operator was fired for FMLA falsification and claimed his employer terminated him because he was transgender. The employer’s defense was simple: it fired four other employees for the same conduct around the same time. A federal appeals court just said that’s enough.
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
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