Pregnant New Employee
OkieHR11
4 Posts
We recently hired an employee who told us she was five months pregnant on her first day. Currently we do not have a policy for medical leave that does not qualify for FMLA. I do not believe we have allowed or even had a situation where an employee needed medical leave when they were not eligible for FMLA. Can anyone tell me what we are legally required to provide to this employee ( we are in Oklahoma)? We want to do the right thing and allow her time off, however, she was hired in a position whose busiest time of year is during the time she will deliver and I am afraid that we might only be able to give her the time off that she accrues for PTO which would be around 2 weeks. I do not know if a Dr. would even release someone to come back to work that soon and do not want to run into issues there either. If anyone has input I would really appreciate it.
Comments
Does your company have a leave of absence policy (other than FML)? We allow a maximum of a 6 month leave of absence that applies to all employees regardless if they are eligible for FML.
Check the EEOC's FAQ on pregnancy discrimination. Generally, you have to treat temporary disability from pregnancy related issues the same as any other medically induced temporary disability. If you had an employee who was not FMLA eligible who had to have open surgery of some kind that would put him out of work for 3 or 4 weeks, what would you do?
Keep in mind that she may have a great pregnancy and a flawless natural delivery and return to work very quickly.
[quote user="OkieHR11"]Thank you all very much for your comments. I calculated that the employee will only be eligible for 36 hours of leave at the time of her due date if everything goes "normally". This situation is hard because I do not think that the Company will be able to allow more time off no matter what the reason for leave would be due to the position and training involved. [/quote]
I worked at a company that had only three options: vacation, FMLA, or attendance policy. That's a tough environment in a situation like this. Just be certain that your attendance policy will be, and has been, uniformly applied before you take any action against the employee.
Follow up: The Company decided that they could allow this employee to take 4 weeks off for maternity leave in addition to her 36 hours of PTO. The employee stated that if she had to have a c- section she would need more time off (6 weeks). I understand that many places would allow the extra two weeks but the owners of the company do not want to do this. Any advice or suggestions?
What legal issues am I looking at here (Pregnancy Discrimination, ADA)? We are based in Oklahoma and as stated before we have not had a situation come up where we have allowed a person to take time off that was not eligible for FMLA.