What constitutes "hours worked" for FMLA eligibility?
skipper
9 Posts
How do companies determine whether an employee meets the requirement of 1,250 hours of service under principles of FLSA for determining compensable hours of work? Does anyone include paid time off, such as holidays, vacation, sick leave, personal days, jury duty, bereavement leave, etc? Does anyone include FMLA leave time, whether paid or unpaid? Do you evaluate/re-verify 1250 hours eligibility on a monthly basis for someone taking FMLA leave, whether continuous or intermittent, whether paid or unpaid?
Comments
FMLA uses the criteria for "work" as established by FLSA.
Work is not clearly defined in FLSA. However, it does NOT include paid holiday time, since the employee is NOT performing duties of the job. Vacation time, sick time, other time off, even if paid out of accrued benefits, would not be considered work time. Even pay while NO work is being performed would not be considered work time (e.g., on-call time, or regular pay to cover a need to close the office because of an emergency -- some emplyers may pay the reular earnings during that time).
These unusal regular earnings even while not working really shouldn't make that much difference in caluclating the 1,250 htreshold. After all, assuming a work week of 40 hours or 168 or 176 per month, 1,250 hours only comes to about 8 1/2 or 9 months out of the 12.
Whether you want to expand it to include paid time off, of course, is up to your policy, but it is not required by FMLA.
Regarding ongoing eligiblity, once approved for FMLA for the current leave, that is sufficient (assuming the emplyee was in fact eligible). If eligibility ends during FMLA leave (because th emepllyee would jnot have worked at least 1,250 during theprevious 12 months), you would not be allowed to terminate FMLA at that point, since at the time it was approved, the employee was eligible for it. Upon return and the employee requests a NEW leave, then, of course, the re-calcualtion would have to be done. For intermittent leave from the original approval, again no recalculation would be done since the intermittent leave was approved at the time the employe was eligible and is in effect a continuing leave.