tl;dr at the bottom. I’m an HR professional. Part of my position includes administering and managing FMLA leave. My state recently implemented a paid leave program. (You can probably figure out which state easily)
By law, anytime an employee asks for leave, we have to tell them if it qualifies under FMLA & send them FMLA paperwork. With the new state paid leave law, we had to send out paid leave information notices to ALL employees last month & we have to notify all incoming new employees during their orientation.
But we aren’t required to remind someone they’re eligible for paid leave when they’re going on FMLA. Technically we have no legal obligation to tell them again…but clearly it’s in poor faith to not remind someone.
My boss (HR director) has told me to NEVER remind an employee they’re qualified for paid leave and said it’s their issue if they forget to apply. She told me we already “did our part by notifying all active employees, and handing flyers out to new employees at orientation”. She told me we “want” people to forget to apply for paid leave because they’ll be more incentivized to come back to work if they’re “broke” and said people will convince their doctors to take them off the full 12 weeks when they might not need it in order to get paid time off for 12 weeks.
This feels so wrong to me. I’m doing applications to other companies and in the meantime I’m telling people they’re eligible anyways. I’m young and didn’t realize how truly scammy HR is. But I’m stuck now 🙂 might as well try to be an honest HR pro.
tl;dr I work in HR and the HR director told me to never remind employees they’re eligible for paid leave. She wants them to be so broke that they feel like they can’t use their full 12-weeks of FMLA.