An employee can opt to substitute accrued vacation, personal, or sick leave, but an employer may not require an employee to do so. This is a dramatic scaling back from the prior iteration of the bill, which would have provided extended FMLA for a far broader range of COVID-19-related reasons.Īs with the prior bill, the first segment days of emergency FMLA leave (which has been reduced from 14 days to 10 days in the revised bill) can be unpaid.
This “qualifying need” is limited to circumstances where an employee is unable to work (or telework) due to a need to care for a minor child if the child’s school or place of child care has been closed or is unavailable due to a public health emergency.
The revised bill provides that private-sector employers with fewer than 500 employees, and covered public-sector employers, must provide up to 12 weeks of job-protected FMLA leave for “a qualifying need related to a public health emergency” to employees who have been on the payroll for 30 calendar days. The new legislation released by the House generally narrows and targets these relief programs, and attempts to harmonize their interaction. This revised bill now provides as follows: Although the bill was adopted on a bipartisan basis, it immediately drew concern from many quarters, particularly small businesses facing a dramatic downturn in business relating to the current public health emergency, and the real-time economic impact these new requirements would have on these employers. It further adopted an emergency paid sick leave requirement for these same employers, while providing refundable tax credit relief for emergency FMLA and sick leave. Specifically, that bill required private employers with 500 or fewer employees, and most public-sector employers, to provide extended “emergency” FMLA leave for a variety of COVID-19-related contingencies. What the House and Senate ultimately pass separately must be reconciled before a single bill can be approved and sent to the president for his signature.īy way of brief background, in the early hours of Saturday, March 14, the House approved sweeping legislation to address COVID-19, including several proposals relating to employer-mandated paid sick leave, as well as expansion of the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Senate is preparing to debate its own legislation responding to COVID-19. We stress that this bill-like the prior iteration of H.R. While ostensibly styled as “corrections” to the prior legislation, this new bill dramatically changes a number of provisions it had previously adopted. House of Representatives unveiled legislation revisiting the sweeping COVID-19 response bill it passed only days earlier.
0 kommentar(er)
