Corrections or additions?
These articles by Kathleen McGinn Spring were prepared for the
April 18, 2001 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Laws Governing Time Off
Employees may be entitled to unpaid time off from work,
with no adverse consequences, because of their own illness or that
of a family member. Protected time away from the job may also be
mandated
for a number of other reasons, including disability, bereavement,
military service, jury duty, or religious observance. Steven
Berlin,
an attorney who runs the labor and employment law group for Buchanan
Ingersoll in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York City, says it
is amazing how many employers don’t understand their obligations —
and their rights — under state and federal laws governing time
off.
Berlin, who earned his J.D. at Brooklyn Law School, is a 1977 graduate
of the College of Journalism of the University of Maryland at College
Park. While he never worked as a journalist, Berlin says “the
tools are the same.” Both law and reporting, he observes, entail
gathering facts and presenting information so that it achieves
immediate
impact. On Thursday, April 19, Berlin, along with colleagues Shacara
Boone and Beth Cole, speaks on “Time Off: state and federal
laws on employee leave, vacations, and holidays in New Jersey,”
in an all-day seminar beginning at 9 a.m. at the Princeton Marriott.
Cost: $209. It repeats Wednesday, April 25, at the Parsippany Holiday
Inn. Call 715-833-3959.
Knowledge of the laws governing protected leave can save employers
from exposing themselves to liability, and can also keep them from
agreeing to burdensome accommodations they are not required to make.
Buchanan Ingersoll is now winding up a case in which a major employer
ran into “very serious practical ramifications” when a worker
went out on leave. The business was not completely aware of the
worker’s
rights, Berlin says, and did not use the law to minimize the amount
of time off and the consequent disruption to its operations. Berlin
says employers should be aware of the following nuances:
Many different laws govern protected leave. New Jerseylaw and federal law governing absences from work are similar, butnot identical, Berlin says, adding that both are confusing. Forexample,federal law allows employees to take leave “in the smallestincrementof time,” while New Jersey law uses half a day as its minimum.Both laws state the total amount of time off allowed in weeks, andBerlin says it is no easy matter to calculate the end of a leave foran employee who takes the time sporadically, and in increments thatcan equal mere minutes in extreme cases. Factors to be taken intoconsideration include the exact number of hours in an employee’snormalwork week.In addition to keeping track of federal law and law in its own state,employers need to be aware of where an employee requesting leavelives.Says Berlin: “If an employer in Pennsylvania has just one employeein New Jersey, he could be required to comply with the New Jerseyact.”Chronic illness may require special treatment. While someillnesses are one-time situations, others, asthma for instance, maybe chronic conditions. The requirement for employees to obtainverificationfor a doctor is different with a chronic condition, which might notrequire documentation with each new incident. This can become aproblemfor employers, says Berlin, because a worker may be able to call infrequently and without notice, and say “`I won’t be in today,I’m having an asthma attack,’” a claim the employer may not beable to verify.Protected leave can be triggered by a disability. Whilemany requests for unpaid time off arise from the birth or adoptionof a child, an illness, or a family medical crisis, employees withdisabilities may also request leaves. In those cases, Berlin says,the employer may be required to grant the time off under the Americanswith Disabilities Act. The ADA states that employers need to makereasonable attempts to accommodate a disability, and time off maybe such an accommodation. And while family leave laws limit the totalamount of time an employee may take, the ADA does not.These are just some of the issues employers have to face. Andwhile situations differ, Berlin says an employer’s goal should alwaysbe to “get the maximum you can from your human capital withoutunnecessary liability.”Top Of PageWork vs. Life: How to UnplugSummer’s coming. Are you buying extra batteries foryour laptop so it won’t run out of juice in Yellowstone Park? Youmight want to think twice, says Gil Gordon, a MonmouthJunction-basedauthority on telecommuting who has just written “Turn It Off:How to Unplug from the Anytime-Anywhere Office without DisconnectingYour Career.”Gordon speaks on re-establishing boundaries that separate work andpersonal life on Saturday, April 21, at 2 p.m. at Barnes & Noble onRoute 1 South in North Brunswick. Call 732-545-7966.In the book, Gordon talks about how we have gotten ourselves tangledin our own wireless web, and suggests strategies for working free.Here is an excerpt:None of us wakes up one day and decides, “I think I’ll giveup my free time on weekends, answer my pages during dinner with myspouse, and carry my laptop on Vacation.” Those intrusions ofwork into our personal time result from a process of slow erosion,not sudden upheaval. As employees, we ourselves have unwittinglycontributedto that process and ended up stretching our workdays and workweeks.One of the characteristics of office work up to the 1980s (and thusbefore the deluge of technology) was the containment of most officework within the office. Certainly, the briefcases came home, thetravelingbusinessperson worked on the plane or in a hotel room, and the salesrep caught up on paperwork in the car. But when far less office workwas as easily portable as it is today, the types of work that couldbe packed into that briefcase were much more limited.Employees who still had items on their to-do lists at 5 p.m. weremore likely to stay late in the office than to simply pack up thebriefcase and plan to finish everything after dinner. Briefcasesweren’tbig enough to contain a file drawer’s worth of information, and therewas not easy way to look at a set of engineering drawings or a year’sworth of budget printouts on the kitchen table. At-home evenings andweekend work was mostly limited to reading, drafting memos and reportson yellow pads, and grinding out budgets using a pocket calculator— absolutely archaic activities by today’s standards.If we fast-forward to the late 1990s, we can see that the limitationson the kinds of work that could be done from afar disappeared almostentirely. Looking for the sales reports from the last two quarters?Just log on to the corporate network and download the files. Needto get out a rush memo to the entire sales force? Draft it on yourlaptop and upload it to the mail server, and it’s in the sales reps’mailboxes in seconds. While every aspect of every job was notportable,enough were to enable most office workers to leave at a more desirablehour, get home in time for dinner, and still be able to finish theday’s work at home after having had at least a little time with thespouse or family over the dinner table.So far so good — until the point when those of us taking workhome slipped into some bad habits. The idea that came to us for thenew marketing campaign could now be sketched out on the laptop at10 p.m.; instead of being hastily scribbled down on a note to be takeninto the office and worked on the next day. The budget planning thatwas going on with the overseas offices could now be compressed fromweeks to days because global fax and E-mail meant that the morningmessage sent from Tokyo could be read in the evening — a home— by the financial analyst from the New York office, and so on.. . . As the technology became more complex and more integral overthe years, it became evident to me how my technology-enabled workwas squeezing free time out of my life, and squeezing me out of myfamily’s life. I became intrigued by how common these problems werefor others as well and started paying serious attention to work-lifeboundary issues in the early 1990s. . .This book isn’t meant to stir up a revolution against today’s portabletechnology. Instead it’s meant to help you use and deal with thattechnology more effectively in three ways.1. Understand the role that mobile-office tools andtechnologyplay in your life, and determine whether they might be hurting asmuch as helping;2. Decide how and where you want to begin drawing theline between the part of your life that you’re willing to devote toanytime/anywhere work, and the rest of your life that you’d ratherreserve for yourself;3. Develop a customized plan for regaining control ofyour use of these tools, and then discussing your plan and itsimplicationswith your clients, managers, and co-workers — in a way that willgain their cooperation.We seem to be committed to a world of work in which “domore with less — and do it faster” is the guiding principle.Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that the nonstop work made possibleby today’s technology is really good over the long term for you oryour customers and clients or your employer.Next StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
