Under the Family Medical Leave Act (“FMLA”), employers are required to provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave to employees with certain family or medical issues. These issues include attending to serious health conditions that make the employee unable to work, or caring for newborns or family members. 

A frequent dilemma that employers often face is what to do when an employee has exhausted all available FMLA leave and still cannot return to work. One employer, Gold Medal Bakery, currently finds itself in litigation surrounding this issue.

• Age Discrimination
• Civil Litigation
• Discovery
• Discrimination
• Family Medical Leave
• Termination With or Without Cause
• Wrongful Termination

When an employee brings a lawsuit alleging that his employer retaliated or discriminated against him, courts typically assess the claim by using a burden-shifting approach. Under this approach, after the employer offers a “legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason” for its actions, the employee has to come forward with evidence showing that the reason was pretextual.

The recent decision in Stephenson v. Potterfield Group LLC serves as an example of how an employee can meet this burden.

• Civil Litigation
• Discrimination
• Family Medical Leave
• Termination With or Without Cause
• Wrongful Termination

Grab your matzoh or Scotch cream eggs or whatever your favorite snack is this time of year and settle in for this week’s Inbox on Suits by Suits:

• The Polaroid bankruptcy trustee has sued the company’s former CEO Lorence Harmer to claw back $5.1 million in alleged kickback payments.
• The bankruptcy judge overseeing American’s Chapter 11 proceedings delayed ruling on the severance package for American’s CEO Tom Horton when he approved the airline’s merger agreement with US Airways on Wednesday.  The U.S. Trustee had objected to the package.  We especially like Kyle Arnold’s reporting in Tulsa World on these developments, and not just because he quoted one of us.
• A pregnancy discrimination lawsuit filed in 2009 by Julie Gilman Veronese against Lucasfilm Ltd. is headed back to the trial court after an appellate court found fault with the jury instructions and reversed the $1.3 million verdict for Veronese ($1.2 million of which was attorneys’ fees) and the California Supreme Court declined to review the ruling on Wednesday.  George Lucas testified in the first trial.
• After a deal was struck last night, New York City appears to be headed the way of Seattle and San Francisco in requiring employers of a certain size to provide paid sick leave to its employees.  Under the proposed legislation, companies with 15 or more employees would be required to compensate their employees for up to five sick days per year.  As we’ve noted here before, federal law does not require paid sick leave and few state laws do.

• Bankruptcy
• Change-in-Control Provisions
• Discrimination
• Executive Compensation
• Family Medical Leave
• Pregnancy Discrimination
• The Inbox

Yesterday, we had good news for Bob Cratchit:  he has a right under the FLSA to more compensation than Scrooge pays him, and could take legal action to protect that right.  But what about the other unfairness and indignities that Bob suffers as Scrooge’s employee – such as the cold office and Bob’s inability to secure Tiny Tim proper medical care?  Would any federal laws protect him?  That’s the subject of today’s post, and the news is not good for Bob.

• Family Medical Leave
• The Basics
• Workplace Conditions (Occupational Safety and Health)

Bob Cratchit’s boss, Ebenezer Scrooge, is an “odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man.”  Or, at least that’s what Mrs. Cratchit says of him after feeding her family of eight, including her crippled son, Tiny Tim, a too-small pudding for dessert on Christmas.  Readers of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol could easily reach the same conclusion.   Bob, a clerk in Scrooge’s business (which some suggest is what we would call a stock brokerage today), is paid a mere 15 shillings weekly to work six days a week in an office that Scrooge refuses to adequately heat.  That seems bad.  But, today, in say, New London, somewhere in the U.S.A., would it be illegal?  For these final days of the holiday season, we explore possible causes of action in Cratchit v. Scrooge.  (We are not the only lawyers with these types of holiday musings.)

• Family Medical Leave
• The Basics
• Wage and Hour‎
• Workplace Conditions (Occupational Safety and Health)