Family and Medical leave Act Management Research Paper

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Family and Medical Leave Act
The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is a federal law that was enacted in 1993 and signed by President Bill Clinton. The Act was formulated to provide employees with an opportunity to take unpaid leave following family and serious medical reasons (Schwartz and Engler 31). The employees must, however, meet certain criteria for them to enjoy the benefits of the FMLA act. For instance, they must work in public agencies or in covered companies that have employed more than fifty employees for more than twenty weeks either in the previous or current year and must be within seventy-five miles of the workplace (Ruhm). Employees must have worked for more than twelve months and for approximately 1250 hours within the twelve months before applying for the leave (Knight 16). The conditions of the Act are that employees must go back to their previous position and work under the same terms as before they went for leave.
Further, they must also receive health coverage, if available, from their employers even during the time of their leave (Schwartz and Engler 31). The FMLA Act is meant to protect employees from job loss following a leave from work due to medical or family reasons. Recently, there have been talks of providing paid leave for eligible employees on a national level since some States have already enacted laws that facilitate paid leave. This paper seeks to examine key issues surrounding the FMLA and how they relate to the workplace. This is especially important in the contemporary American workplace where work-family balance is an important area that has attracted the attention of human resource managers.
Impact of the FMLA
Since its enactment, the FMLA has had several impacts on several groups of people. For instance, one of the most significant effects of FMLA is an increase in leave uptake among new mothers and mothers who have children aged below one year (Rossin-Slater 9). This is a positive impact because more new mothers can take care of their newborns without fear of losing their jobs or compromising their careers as a result of childbirth. Without FMLA, it is likely that more women would have either quit their jobs once they started a family to get time to take of children, or would have opted to remain at their workplace and withhold from raising kids.
Moreover, FMLA has improved job continuity for women, especially for mothers, who would be more disadvantaged than men and non-mothers if the law did not exist (Rossin-Slater). This is because mothers are often faced with the choice of quitting their careers once they give birth, a choice that is not available for men, thus discontinuing their jobs. In particular, the universality of the law enhances job continuity because its impact on the issue can be experienced at a national level. The job continuity has therefore been attributed to the fact that women are now able to go back to work once their 12 weeks leave is over (Cannonier 108) since the risk of job loss has been eliminated.
One of the negative effects of FMLA and other leave policy is a decreased hiring rate of women in the private sector. According to Rossin-Slater (12), employers may discriminate on women ...