Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993

Identification Legislation to provide emergency medical leave for American workers

Date Signed on February 5, 1993

The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 was the first federal law in the United States to mandate that employees who were ill, had new children, or needed to attend to immediate family members’ medical emergencies be allowed a leave of absence from work without fear of losing their jobs.

The movement to create the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) began when the US Supreme Court struck down a 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruling that businesses that allowed medical leaves must also provide maternity leaves. Congress included the same provisions in the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. Under pressure from constituents, Congress passed a more comprehensive family leave act in 1990 that provided mandatory sick leave for employees and their children, spouse, or parents, as well as maternity leave, only to have it vetoed by President George H. W. Bush. President Bill Clinton had promised to support such legislation during his 1992 campaign, and, at his urging, Congress passed the FMLA, which was the first bill that Clinton signed into law.

The dramatic increases in both full-time labor force participation by women and the percentage of married-couple households in which both spouses were employed had created strong support for the FMLA within the population as a whole and both major political parties. This federal law, which was drafted by the National Partnership for Women and Families, mandates that an eligible employee may take twelve weeks of unpaid annual leave to care for a new son or daughter (by birth, foster care, or adoption); care for a sick spouse, child, or parent; or recover from a debilitating illness. Any employee who has worked for twelve months and has worked 1,250 hours during those twelve months for a business that employs fifty or more employees within a seventy-five-mile radius is eligible. The employer must allow the employee to return to the same position or one with a similar salary and responsibilities, with no loss of tenure or benefits, and any existing group health insurance must be maintained during the leave. In 2015, the US Department of Labor amended the definition of a “spouse” under FML to include same-sex and common-law spouses.

Impact

Research showed that, in spite of some critics’ concerns that low-income workers would not benefit from the FMLA because they could not afford to take unpaid leave, employees felt that a temporary loss of income was better than dismissal because of a personal or family emergency, regardless of their socioeconomic status. Overall, employees returned to work sooner after taking an FMLA leave than they did in work places without emergency-leave provisions before the act’s passage. The fact that both men and women are covered under the FMLA, unlike earlier maternity leave laws, reduced the perception that women were “more expensive” to employ. Women’s movement and elderly activist organizations agree that this limited relief for family caregivers represents an important move toward equity in the American workplace, although it falls far short of provisions in other industrialized nations. Despite the protections offered to workers through the FMLA, critics allege that the law falls short by failing to mandate paid leave. A 2014 report by the International Labour Organization reviewed 185 countries worldwide and found that only Papua New Guinea and the United States did not require employers to provide paid leave for new parents. Paid parental leave is found to reduce the rates of infant mortality. To address this deficiency of the FMLA, some states, including California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, have passed laws to create paid family leave through employee-paid payroll taxes. Furthermore, FMLA does not cover employees who work for small firms or who worked less than 1,760 hours for their employer in the twelve month prior to leave, making the law’s protections inaccessible to many American workers.

Bibliography

Aitchison, Will. The FMLA: Understanding the Family and Medical Leave Act. Labor Relations Information System, 2003.

Decker, Kurt H. Family and Medical Leave in a Nutshell. West Group, 2000.

International Labour Organization. Maternity and Paternity at Work: Law and Practice across the World. International Labour Office, 2014.

Livingston, Gretchen. "Among 41 Nations, U.S. Is the Outlier When It Comes to Paid Parental Leave." Pew Research Center, 26 Sept. 2016, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/26/u-s-lacks-mandated-paid-parental-leave. Accessed 18 Nov. 2016.

Ludden, Jennifer. "FMLA Not Really Working for Many Employees." Morning Edition, 5 Feb. 2013, www.npr.org/2013/02/05/171078451/fmla-not-really-working-for-many-employees. Accessed 18 Nov. 2016.

Shepherd-Banigan, Megan, and Janice F. Bell. "Paid Leave Benefits among a National Sample of Working Mothers with Infants in the United States." Maternal and Child Health Journal, vol. 18, no. 1, 2014, pp. 286–95.