Can my employer deduct this time from FMLA?

Check your employer's FMLA policy. If it states that your employer can require you to use your vacation or other paid time off during FMLA qualifying absences, then your employer is probably correct. Under such a policy, if the time taken off for the pregnancy related complications qualifies for FMLA leave, your employer can probably deduct that time from the 12 available FMLA weeks. Therefore, unless the policy states otherwise, you probably cannot extend your FMLA by the amount of available vacation or time off.

As for treating shifts of less than 9 hours as partial FMLA days, full and partial days are based on your normal schedule. If you are unable to work your normal work schedule because of an FMLA qualifying reason, then the portion of the scheduled hours that you cannot work counts as a partial FMLA day. For example, if your regular shift is 8 hours and you are able to work only 6, then you used 1/4 of an FMLA day (2/8). If your normal shift is longer, say 12 hours, then you only use 1/6 of an FMLA day when you miss 2 hours of it.

In your case, it may be important to document the higher number of hours that you were normally scheduled to work. Be aware, though that that could be a double edged sword. For example, if you can only work 8 hours out of 9, you use up 1/9 of an FMLA day. However, if you can only work 8 hours but normally worked 12 hours, you actually use up 1/4 of an FMLA day ((12-8)/12).

posted by Neil Klingshirn  |  Nov 9, 2010 12:14 PM [EST]