FMLA covers 12 weeks. Without pay. And it doesn’t cover everyone. I don’t know if a part time WalMart employee would be covered.
I found this under for eligibility on the DOL website:
# (2) ELIGIBLE EMPLOYEE.--
* (A) IN GENERAL.--The term "eligible employee" means an employee who has been employed
o (i) for at least 12 months by the employer with respect to whom leave is requested under section 102; and
o (ii) for at least 1,250 hours of service with such employer during the previous 12-month period.
* (B) EXCLUSIONS.--The term "eligible employee" does not include
o (i) any Federal officer or employee covered under subchapter V of chapter 63 of title 5, United States Code (as added by title II of this Act); or
o (ii) any employee of an employer who is employed at a worksite at which such employer employs less than 50 employees if the total number of employees employed by that employer within 75 miles of that worksite is less than 50.
It does look like the person only gets 12 weeks leave, however, regardless of what condition caused them to need the leave.
I’m being whooshed here, right? Please tell me I’m being whooshed here and you don’t actually believe that the care of a child is a recreational activity on a par with watching TV.
Since full time is 2,000 hours a year, looks like you’d need to be a lttle more than half time employee to get covered.
Well, then our culture is supportive of children between the ages of 6-18 and poor kids from utero onward. Middle class kids of 0-5? Surely you don’t mean to say that we value, a culture, poor kids more than other kids? The amount of money doesn’t always speak for itself.
I don’t deny that we do, as a society, spend a lot of public funds on things that benefit children. We agree on that. But I think it’s insufficient as an argument that the culture overall is child-friendly.
Schooling, for example, is as much about what we hope those children will do for society as grown-ups as it is a statement that we value children in and of themselves.
Please tell me I’m being whooshed, and that you don’t actually believe that childless employees should be discriminated against based on their status as non-parents.
Perhaps what you and Asbestos are trying to say is that business and industry is not child-friendly. But it can also be said that business and industry is not employee-friendly, not labor-friendly, and not environmentally-friendly. If business and industry were child-friendly, it would provide for more telecommuting and child-care options.
Wouldn’t it be great if more businesses/offices had their own in-house daycare? Mom could bring baby to work and breastfeed every few hours on-site. But, sigh, I don’t ever see that being a wide-spread thing, because business and industry is not very child-friendly.
No Mango, your not being wooshed, and I’m having the same thought as Catsix.
I chose to have children. And I make the sacrifices I make to care for my children. I waited to have them until I had a support network and adequate finances. When I have to work late, my mother or husband cares for my children. I never expect my coworkers to pick up unreasonable slack do to the choices I made. They didn’t have babies (or if they did, they are raising them). Why should I drop what I am doing to cover for a coworker’s needs. Now, I do. We all do - if they are child related or not. I cover for people all the time for a variety of reasons. And they cover for me, sometimes because my kids are ill, sometimes because I need a day off.
Raising kids is important - but its a responsibility parents commit to, not everyone else.
Yeah, I can agree on that unreservedly.
I’m relieved I can stop arguing this because let’s face it, my position was pretty weak. LOL.
And FTR, as a parent, I personally don’t think it would be fair for me to get scheduling preferences. If my employer wants to be understanding, great. But I don’t feel entitled. And if I, for example, have the option of going part time or flex time? Everyone in the office should have that option too. I support ideas like the FMLA because I think it’s better for society and the babies if tiny infants have that intensive early time with their parents. But as for parents getting favoritism for the duration of the child-rearing. Nope.
This discussion of workplaces reminds me how lucky I am to have my job. It is the most child-friendly workplace I have been in. My boss is a mother of three young children. She telecommutes most of the time. If she has to come in and has her kids, she brings them with her. Our office manager also had three young kids. She telecommutes most of the time during the summer because her kids are not in school. During the school year, she is out of here in time to be home with her kids. She also had brought her kids in a few times. A coworker is pregnant and has cut back her hours due to her pregnancy. We have part-time positions with options to telecommute which are perfect for mothers. I hope I am still in this job if/when I have a family!
FMLA isn’t specific to those who are having babies or adopting babies, it covers situations in which someone would have to take the time off to care for a spouse or a parent also.
If, for example, my mother needed my care because she had some kind of serious health problem, I could take 12 weeks unpaid leave from my job and take care of her.
nyctea, are your boss’s kids somewhere that they do not interfere with the ability of other employees to do their work? We’ve had a couple of people here just bring in their kids and they were in everyone’s way. Does that happen where you work?
…and some businesses will never be child-friendly by default for good reasons that are beyond the business’ control. Telecommuting is not the end all solution either for most businesses.
It would be great if you could offer this on-site childcare for free or for a nominal fee. I suppose that every business (no matter what size or how many employees) should purchase additional property, build to suit for a childcare center, hire more people to care for the children, get the appropriate licenses, insurance, fingerprinting, communication equipment, janitorial, yadda, yadda, yadda…and guess what? If your kid still gets sick, you still have to clock out, get him/her and go home to care for the sick child. So, what is actually accomplished here except burdening every employer with a side business of childcare when the business’ specialty could be mining, farming, chip manufacturing, energy generating plant, a liquor store, etc.? Just a shorter trip to pick up your kid at the cost of thousands to millions of dollars to the employer, when there are professional day care centers who would do a better job of child care because it is their PRIMARY business?
Our youngest (a 2 y.o. who will not let you work if he’s in the office!) is in a professional and licensed daycare center that is not a secondary business to any other business interest and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I say this as a current business owner who has explored the possibility of opening an adjacent day care center…too damn costly and I would have to charge my employees more than a typical (and in most cases, superior) child care center. Some large businesses could pull it off and pass the cost on to their consumers, but most other businesses would price themselves out of the market if they tried that.
nyctea, sounds like you have a good situation, stick with it…they are far and few between.
No they do not interfere. If they did, believe me, I would have said so. My boss has her own office, so the kids either hand in there, or in the kitchen. My office manager’s kids sit quiety at a computer and you barely hear a peep out of them. They are very well-behaved. And it’s not very often they come in. Maybe once a month or less.
I think what it comes down to is that people want to behave as though we all live in a vacuum. We don’t. I guess I kind of regard kids, whether they’re mine (well, actually, I don’t have any, so…), my coworker’s, or some woman in Elko’s as “our children”- in other words, society as a whole has a responsibility to try to provide the best possible environment for the next generation to grow up in. You know, the generation that is going to be paying the taxes that your, my, and ** catsix’s** Social Security checks will be paid from? (think about it that way for a few minutes, it might give you a different perspective.)
Also, I don’t think it’s unreasonable in a business that functions on a 24/7 basis to ask that a single gal with no kids like, oh, say, me, have her days off during the week because it may be difficult for a mother to find reliable child care on the weekends. Sure, I’d like to have Saturday night off, but I would consider not getting to watch my Britcoms, or, gasp, having to suffer the inconvenience of having to set my VCR to tape them for later viewing to be my very tiny contribution to the well-being of society as a whole.
[hijack]Just as an aside, when I was working at Wal-Mart, one of my coworkers had gotten approval, two months in advance, to have a couple of days off to go to her cousin’s wedding. The manager that had approved it got transferred, and the new one, just a couple of days before the wedding, rescinded the approval and told her that, on short notice, she had to find someone to trade shifts with her. I overheard her complaining about the situation in the break room and quite happily volunteered to swap a day with her. The new manager gave us both a hard time because she was afraid that the way our work weeks wrapped around the pay periods, one of us might end up with overtime, and God forbid that a store that pulled in a million dollars per month in pure profit for a multi-billion corporation might have to give up an extra thirty-two dollars so that an employee could do something so trivial as attend a family wedding. Once we pointed out to her that we both only worked four-day work weeks, so neither of us woud be placed over forty hours by the switch, she let us do it, but she still seemed put out by the whole thing, because, dammit, she was going to have to actally take a pencil and scribble a note in the schedule book, and that is such a lot of work…
So, even if you’ve got employees who are willing to take up the slack for one another, you still have to deal with corporate drone manager types who will put obstacles in your way.[/hijack]
Yeticus, you make many good points about the cost-prohibitiveness (is that even a word?) of the company day care scenario.
This made a certain song pop into my head:
Ugh I hate that song 
One more thing-
I really think that mothers who actually want to, like, take care of their own children could be fairly easily accomodated if employers would be a bit more flexible.
I’m one of those critters who generally prefers to work second shift. My brain simply will not function before about eleven in the morning, I hit my peak of productivity around four in the afternoon, and my sleep cycle seems to be set to go to bed around one or two in the morning and wake up around nine. Most jobs I can think of that have second shifts are really crappy low skill type jobs. The nice officey ones have this mentality that a proper office should be open from nine to six, period. If more workplaces had longer hours, people like me would be happy because we would be working the hours when we could give our very best, working mothers would be happy because they could maybe work an earlier shift and be out of work in time to pick up the kids from school and not have to pay for child care in the afternoon, the customers would be happy because there would be a wider range of time in which they could do business, so they wouldn’t have to try to cram stuff into their lunch our or thirty seconds before they had to be to work because they get off too late to be able to get to your place of business, and happy customers would mean more business, and therefore more money, which would make the employers happy.
Considering that Social Security was supposed to be rather like a retirement account that one pays into throughout their working years in order to reap the benefits when they retire, and it is currently being used for a whole host of other things it was not intended for and certainly is not the ‘trust fund’ it was supposed to be, I’d be a lot happier if I could take the money I’m currently paying the SSA every year and putting it in with the rest of my own personal retirement savings and would gladly give up the ability to draw a SS check when I’m retired in return.
It doesn’t matter what I want to spend my free time doing. I am absolutely as entitled as anyone else with my level of seniority to my time off. What I’m doing on that weekend is irrelevant. The only relevant point to the employer should be that an employee’s availability to work is what the employee stated. Choosing to have a child does not give you an immediate right to preferential scheduling of your work hours.
It does not matter why I want Saturday off or why La Tonya wants Saturday off. Neither one of us should be given preferential treatment unless the requisition for days off is based upon seniority (as it is with vacation time where I work) such that those with more seniority get first picks for their vacation times.
Yeah, me too! Hey, we found something we agree on! Pour the wine, bring on the boys in Tunder From Down Under, let the heavens rejoice!
It’s one thing to support and help, it’s quite another to completely allow the "other guys’ to have their way “because they’re moms”.
Asking is one thing. Demanding, or making it just a default is quite another altogether, and this is from a mom. It’s not required by our society, or anything else for that matter, that we HAVE children. We choose to have them. I had them, and as Dangerosa said, I made the sacrifices that were necessary to work AND be a mom. It is just as necessary for “society’s good” to have mentally healthy fulfilled workers of all persuasions, child-ed (not a real word :D) and childless.
Within a company, hopefully all coworkers will care enough for each other to assist in things like schedules, emergency time off, vacation time and so on. IMHO, it’s completely wrong to say “well so and so has a child, therefore you MUSt take X shift, thats all there is to it”. And I don’t think it matters if all the childless employee had planned WAS TV. It was the parent’s choice to have those kids, ergo, HIS/HER responsibility to take care of them.
Life isn’t fair, and a lot of times it’s not fun. A lot of times it’s just plain SUCKY and stressful. It’s wrong to assume it’s less so for a childless employee and therefore they should just get all the crap shifts and it should be assumed that they’ll cover for anyone out with sick kids.
Sick leave is there for a reason. Non parents have just as much a right to it as parents do. If you’ve used all of your sick time, whether you are a parent or not, then that means that you have to take unpaid leave. It doesn’t mean you get to make someone who "doesn’t have anything better to do take on YOUR work so you can go to a little league game.
This is really a different matter than parents vs non parents, that is a “Walmart and its ilk and their treatment of employees” thing.
Which is, or should be addressed in this country, imho.