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The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) requires employers to allow employees to take 12 weeks of unpaid leave annually for a serious illness, to care for an immediate family member, or following an adoption or birth. The FMLA now applies to companies that employ 50 or more workers, but during the campaign President Obama supported expanding it to cover businesses with as few as 25 employees.
Expanding the FMLA will have many unintended consequences that will hurt, not help, working families. Businesses and their employees bear the cost of the FMLA. According to the Employment Policy Foundation, direct FMLA compliance costs totaled $21 billion in 2004.
Rather than relying on costly mandates like the FMLA, the government should consider policies that increase workplace flexibility:
- For instance, many employees would prefer to receive compensatory time off in lieu of overtime pay, but the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires overtime work to be compensated with time-and-a-half cash wages.
- This means that employees who work extra hours one week are unable to offset those hours with comp time in a subsequent week.
Shouldn't private sector workers have similar options?
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