The FMLA provides for unpaid and job-protected leave to employees. However, neither every employer is obligated to offer it nor every employee is covered by it. An employer is obligated to offer FMLA leave only if it employed 50 or more employees for at least 20 consecutive weeks in the current or preceding year. This is the basic tenet for an employer to offer FMLA leave to its employees.

Employees too must fulfill some terms of eligibility for FMLA leaves. An employee needs to have worked for the employer for at least 12 months before being eligible for FMLA leave. He or she also needs to have worked for at least 1250 hours in the 12 months period preceding the date of leave.

There are a lot of complications associated with FMLA; we will try to summarize some of them here.

FMLA Eligibility Rules and Requirements

There are many subtleties in the FMLA eligibility rules and requirements that every employer as well as employee needs to know.

• The requirement that 50 or more employees working for at least 20 weeks in the current or preceding year can be tricky. Employers need to count all full-time and part-time employees along with those that work jointly with other companies and those on leave. However, it does not count independent contractors. So, employers who engage a number of independent contractors may escape the net of FMLA.
• To be eligible for FMLA, an employee needs to have worked in an establishment having 50 or more people within a 75-mile radius of his place of work. So, even if the employer employs more than 50 employees in total, none of them may be eligible for FMLA if they are divided into small groups at a distance of more than 75 miles from one another. However, employees in public sector organizations are not bound by this rule.
• An employee is eligible for FMLA if he has worked for the employer for at least 12 months. Even if an employee has not worked for 12 months consecutively, but in two, three or more spells, he is eligible for the leave. Nevertheless, a break of 7 years or more than that is not usually counted unless the reason behind the same is some kind of military obligation.
• The condition of working for at least 1250 hours during the one-year period preceding the leave is a liberal one. It does not need to be consecutive working days. It may be punctuated by vacations, sick days or other days when employees have not worked.
• FMLA leave is available only for specific reasons involving the family of the employee. The scope of the family in FMLA includes spouse/husband, children, and parents. So, if you are seeking leave to take care of your live-in partner or parents-in-law, the employer is not obligated to offer you such a leave. Nevertheless, if you are in California you can get unpaid leave for your live-in partner or parents-in-law. Employers in California are obligated to offer such privileges to their employees since they are bound by the California Family Rights Act.

Conclusion

FMLA provides for unpaid, job-protected leaves, but there are subtleties that employers as well as employees need to be aware of. Armed with these subtleties both employers and employees can have a transparent idea about their obligations and rights.