Posted on April 22nd, 2020
Find below a full transcript of this video.
What’s up fellow entrepreneurs is John Fagerholm again. Yesterday I talked about the sick leave portion of the Family’s First Coronavirus Protection Act.
Today I want to talk about the expansion of the FMLA portion of this same act. Like the sick leave portion, the act begins April 1st, 2020 and goes through December 31st, 2020 as it’s written today.
Maybe there’ll be extensions, who knows.
And also it basically requires employers with 500 or more employees to provide 12 weeks of leave, family leave to parents whose children are either out of school or can’t go to daycare because of the Coronavirus epidemic.
What this act does is, first of all, it expands the definition of what a parent is. And then it requires the employer to, after 10 days, for the remaining 10 weeks of the 12 weeks, it requires the employer to pay the employee two thirds of their salary.
What’s important here is that they’ve really expanded what the definition of an employer is. I’m sorry, the definition of what a parent is.
Let me read that off to you in my notes. So basically, what this act is defining as a parent is, a biological, foster or adoptive parent, a step parent, a parent-in-law, a parent of a child of a domestic partner, or a legal guardian.
That’s quite a bit of an expansion on what the usual definition of a parent is in FMLA.
The other things you need to know is that, well obviously, the two thirds pay of what their max salary was before they went on this leave.
Even though this act says that the first 10 days are unpaid, because of the paid sick leave law, which also covers parents that need to take care of their children, it’s basically the same thing because you’re going to be paying the paid sick leave.
However, go back and watch that video also, it’s going to be at the two thirds rate.
Okay, so a couple things I didn’t talk about that effect both paid sick leave and the FMLA is, one of the things you have to do is you have to give three types of notice for this, for both the paid sick leave and for the expansion of the FMLA.
One is you have to put up posters, you have to send emails to anyone that works remotely. And three, any new hires have to be given this information in their hire packet.
So that’s all of the bad parts of it, at least for the employer. But the one good part is this act did allow for a tax credit for all of that.
Again, things are changing all the time, and there’s the federal rules, but then there’s also the state rules.
And then there’s also, counties are now getting involved and of course, cities are getting involved too, expanding some of these rules, changing these rules, some conflict with the others.
Remember, this is just an informational video. It isn’t specific to your situation. Make sure that you have someone on hand that can answer your questions specifically like an attorney, whoever you’re using.
All right, until next time. Be productive.
