The Essential Guide to Family & Medical Leave

chapter 2 | is your company covered by the FMLA? | 19
Example: You are the HR manager of Blue Lagoon Pool Maintenance and Repair
Service in Scottsdale, Arizona, which has 34 year-round employees but hires extra
part-time employees when pool season heats up. Blue Lagoon hires 25 part-time
employees the first week of May. When calculating whether Blue Lagoon has enough
employees to be subject to the FMLA, you don’t count the new part-time employees
for the first week of May, but you do count them for every week they work after that,
even if they only work one day a week. As of the middle of October, all the part-time
employees still work for Blue Lagoon, so you correctly determine that Blue Lagoon
will have at least 50 employees for 20 or more weeks of the year. Blue Lagoon will be
subject to the FMLA.
The 20 weeks don’t have to be consecutive. For example, if your company
is a seasonal employer and has more than 50 employees during all of spring
and fall (six months of the year), but only ten employees during summer
and winter, your company will be covered by the FMLA. And a company
that has reduced its workforce from at least 50 employees to less than 50
employees within the last year is still covered by FMLA if it employed 50 or
more employees for any 20 weeks in the current or preceding calendar year.
Example: Your company, Razberry Jam Productions, employs 62 field workers
from March 15 to May 1 every year, and 53 seasonal cannery workers from June 1 to
October 15. The rest of the year, your company maintains a bare-bones staff of 15
shipping and administrative employees. In April, Wendy, a shipping clerk, asks for
leave to take care of her husband as he recovers from surgery. Her manager denies
the leave, telling Wendy that he has counted back 20 calendar weeks and the cannery
was closed for most of that period, so the FMLA doesn’t apply to Razberry Jam
Productions.
You correctly step in and reverse the manager’s decision. What did he do wrong?
The manager should have looked at the entire current and preceding year for the
company. If he had done that, he would have seen, as you did, that your company
employed over 50 employees for more than 20 weeks in that period. Your company
was covered by the FMLA.
If your company didn’t employ 50 employees for at least 20 weeks in
the current or preceding year, it isn’t covered by the FMLA. But, if your