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Friday, August 26, 2005
Ind. Gov't. - State Personnel cracks down on employee leave policies
"State workers’ leave time pinched: Limits placed on family medical, funeral, vacation," is the headline to a story today by Niki Kelly in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. Some quotes:
INDIANAPOLIS – State personnel officials have cracked down on various policies affecting state employees’ funeral leave, vacation time and Family and Medical Leave Act benefits.The biggest changes come in family medical leave, a federal act that requires employers to give employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave a year for birth, a serious health condition or to take care of an immediate family member with a serious health condition.
Employees retain their jobs and benefits.
Before Gov. Mitch Daniels’ taking over, state employees were eligible for family medical leave as soon as they were hired.
Now Debra Minott, state personnel director, is applying a federal eligibility requirement of 12 months’ employment with at least 1,250 hours worked before an employee can use family medical leave.
In another change, employees will be required to use all their available sick leave concurrently with FMLA. Employees previously had to use only up to 10 of their earned sick days.
Minott said the most traditional type of family leave is when an employee leaves for a set period, perhaps to adopt a child or get chemotherapy or take care of a parent. A second type of family leave is intermittent, such as when an employee has a health condition that has been certified by their doctor as serious and flares up sporadically.
Regarding the latter, she said some employees would call in that morning with a migraine and take an unpaid day without sacrificing a sick day. That made it especially hard, she said, to run 24-hour facilities such as hospitals and prisons.
Minott said the federal government established basic rules for family medical leave but employers are allowed to be more generous. That is what Indiana did until now.
“We had a lot of people taking FMLA in the first year and as this progressed over time there were some abuses,” she said. “We had to rein it in.”
Other changes include tweaks to the paid funeral leave policy, which no longer covers greats, such as a great-grandmother or great-grandson. It also limits steps. For instance, a stepchild would be covered but a stepbrother or stepsister would not be. * * *
Minott understands that some employees don’t like the new changes but said “we are stewards of the state’s resources and we need to use these resources for the benefit of the state.”
Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 26, 2005 08:49 AM
Posted to Indiana Government