The Essential Guide to Family & Medical Leave

106 | the essential guide to family and medical leave
Intermittent and Reduced-Schedule Leave
Sometimes an employee does not need a full workweek off at a time. An
employee may, for example, request permission to take hours or days off
“as needed” to care for an ill family member when the usual caretaker
is unavailable. This “intermittent leave” is allowed under the FMLA.
Intermittent leave is leave taken in separate blocks of time for a single
qualifying reason, such as a course of treatment spread over months or flareups
of a chronic illness.
An employee may instead need a reduced work schedule, for example, during
recovery from surgery or illness. The FMLA allows an eligible employee to
take “reduced schedule” leave when he or she needs to work fewer hours per
week or per day than usual, typically while the employee or a family member
is recovering from or being treated for a serious health condition.
When an employee uses one of these forms of leave, figuring out how
much leave the employee is entitled to and how long it will take to use up
the 12-week allotment can be challenging. The challenge is especially tricky
for part-time employees or those with irregular work schedules, because you
have to measure the leave taken based on the employee’s normal workweek.
In this section, we explain how to calculate intermittent and reducedschedule
leave for employees working all types of schedules.
Cross-Reference
See Chapter 9 for information on managing intermittent leave, including
rules that allow flexibility in scheduling. When it passed the FMLA,
Congress recognized that providing intermittent leave could impose a
significant burden on employers. The law gives companies a couple of
options for easing the load, including the right to transfer an employee
who needs intermittent leave to a different position and the right to
require employees to schedule foreseeable intermittent leave in a manner
that isn’t unduly disruptive. These rules—and tips for making sure
employees don’t abuse the right to take intermittent leave—are covered
in Chapter 9.