Hi Friendos,
Today I will share my experience taking paid family leave in 2020 when my father was sick. Because I work for a company with HR people who are great at their jobs, live in a state (New York) with stronger benefits than the federally required minimums, and had a doctor who quickly handled the required paperwork, my overall experience was excellent. If any of those things had not lined up, my experience could have been very different.
The Family and Medical Leave Act was passed in 1993, during the Clinton administration. It is administered by the Department of Labor. Federal law under the FMLA provides eligible workers with up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year with any health benefits continuing through that time and a guarantee of a job to return to after the leave. If you work for a public sector agency, you are eligible. If you work for a private sector employer with 50+ employees and you worked more than 1,250 hours in the year prior to the leave, you are eligible. Otherwise, you are out of luck. In a 2007 report, the Department of Labor estimated that about 54% of employed workers were covered by the FMLA.
If you are eligible, FMLA can be used:
- “For the birth and care of the newborn child of an employee;
- For placement with the employee of a child for adoption or foster care;
- To care for an immediate family member (i.e., spouse, child, or parent) with a serious health condition; or
- To take medical leave when the employee is unable to work because of a serious health condition.”
Those first three uses are for care of others. Until 1969, every state in the U.S. had some kind of labor legislation that restricted only women, because women’s proper function was to care for others. Discourse on the FMLA included the following:
- “a major selling point amongst Congressional Republicans was the idea that the FMLA would reduce abortions because, if women didn’t have to lose their jobs to have babies, they would be less likely to abort a pregnancy,”
- “another important argument centered on the claim that men were being discriminated against in family leave policies, given that when they did exist, they were more likely to apply to women,”
- “employers who were concerned with shielding the private sector from ‘unnecessary costs and excessive government regulations,’”
- “the FMLA would actually increase gender inequality in the workplace by leading to more gender discrimination since employers would be disinclined to hire women due to the presumption that women are more likely to take such leave.”
This last point is consistent with a fear I had when I was in my 20s and applying for jobs in male-dominated workplaces: that employers would prefer to hire a man instead of me, because if I ever got pregnant, they’d have to pay me during maternity leave, but a man would not take paternity leave because there was no such thing at those companies. After all, I was told that the dress code at one of the first companies I worked for did not allow women to wear pants at work until the 1990s.
About a dozen states and the District of Columbia have laws requiring paid family leave, and New York is one of them (since 2016). Some of these states provide eligibility to a larger group of workers (e.g., pulling in those who work at smaller employers), some states allow for broader use of leave (e.g., expanding the definition of family or allowing for use to address the effects of domestic violence). Currently, paid family leave in New York is funded by a payroll tax on employee wages, which is 0.373% for 2024, capped at $333.25 for the year. The money for paid leave needs to come from somewhere.
When an employee claims leave under the FMLA, the employer may require certification and specific types of notice. There are standard forms from the Dept. of Labor, like the one I had to ask my father’s doctor to fill out, and an employer can ask for additional documentation. There are also notice requirements and if an employee does not meet them, the employer may be able to delay or deny the leave. For example, if I want to take FMLA leave for planned medical treatment, I am required to try and schedule treatments at times that minimize disruptions to my employer.
~
In June 2020 I got a phone call from my father. Sadly, I had not spoken to either of my parents for many years, so it was quite a shock to have my phone ring and see he was calling me. “Stephanie. This is your father. [long pause] How are you?” “Well, [long pause], I guess about as well as a person can be during a global pandemic.” The news he was calling to share was also shocking: he had been diagnosed with leukemia and his limited treatment options had little chance of success. I quickly arranged a day trip to visit him and my mother, with my husband and dog-who-hates-car-rides in tow.
The year and a half that followed was highly eventful, but also sometimes weirdly dull. I had my first ever telehealth medical appointments, talk therapy, to discuss how to navigate reconnecting with my parents. I had whole days where I never left my apartment and even agreed to go on an ill-fated camping trip just to do something. Our car got busted up on the way home from that trip, and it was months before the mechanic could get our parts (pandemic supply chain problems). So twice I drove a rental car on trips to visit my dad. On other trips, my parents’ neighbors knew I was around if they saw my little hatchback parked on their cul-de-sac. In 2021 my spouse and I decided we wanted to leave our coop apartment building so we put our place on the market, sold it, moved to a rental, and later bought a condo. No wonder it all seems like a blur when I look back on it now.
Whenever I was going to have time out of office, I let my colleagues know of my plans and coordinated with them so project work was not disrupted too much. One coworker made a point to mention that the year before, he’d used FMLA to visit his parents in Singapore when one of them fell ill. I hadn’t looked at our Employee Handbook in years, but pulled it up and wow, I could take up to 12 weeks of leave and still get a paycheck.
I got in touch with my HR department and they explained the simple process to me: I would ask my father’s doctor to fill out a form, send that back to HR, and then fill out my timesheet a particular way during weeks when I was using the leave. Luckily this doctor was very responsive on email, so getting the paperwork done was no problem.
It was ok for me to be out of office even without the accrued vacation time to cover it.
It had been years since I’d been in my parents’ house. My dad’s work area in the basement still smelled the same.
I had forgotten about his highly personalized filing system.
I had never met my dad’s younger brother, who came for a visit. Now I have an uncle! And aunt and cousins!
One visit, I asked my dad if he remembered his yellow slide rule that was in the left top drawer of his desk. This was the slide rule he had used for a high school math competition, where he won a college scholarship (first in his family to attend college). “Yes, what about it?” “I’m stealing it.” He cried.
It meant so much to spend that time with him. So much benefit from such a modest tax.
On one visit, I had to take my mom to the bank because they had opened a new bank account and something had gone wrong in transferring things over from the old account. She needed to sort things out to make sure they wouldn’t bounce a check. They decided to switch banks in the middle of all this? I learned about all their many different financial accounts and was dismayed at the complexity. I ached to help simplify things so it would be easier for my mom down the road, but after our long estrangement, that wasn’t my role. What I could do was help replace light bulbs that had burned out, get rid of a space heater where one section of the power cord had been charred black, and organize the cabinet with the pills so the expanded supply of medicines was easier to reach.
I also had plenty of moments of being unsure what people expected of me. When my dad was closer to the end, I think some colleagues figured I’d spend much more time with him, but they didn’t know how complicated a relationship I had with my parents. Someone from hospice care seemed to think I’d be in charge of administering morphine or other comfort care as needed. “I don’t live here, I live in New York.” Having no better alternative, she continued to explain the different vials of medicine and supplies she was leaving with us.
At one point my spouse said something to me about how it wasn’t like I was going to just drop everything to take care of my dad, that wasn’t the daughter my parents had raised. I was always going to have a “big” job.
“A law that refuses to take gender into account is effective only if the private social structure does not itself perpetuate women’s inequality, regardless of what the law says. […] our public sphere of work life still presumes an ideal worker who is a male head-of-household with a spouse at home to take care of family considerations. […] Women’s homemaking role allows men to fulfill their employment responsibilities without many impositions or competing priorities, and to measure up to and reinforce the masculine nature of work structures. Laws such as the FMLA do little to change this dynamic.”
– Deborah Anthony, 2008, “The Hidden Harms of the Family and Medical Leave Act: Gender-Neutral Versus Gender-Equal”
If you are eligible for paid leave and ever need to use it, I highly recommend it. If you are eligible for unpaid leave and can manage afford to take time off work, I hope you will consider it.
For those celebrating it today, happy Father’s Day.
-Stephanie
Frequently Taxed Questions 