Bereavement Leave Florida Explained
Bereavement Leave Florida : The FMLA ‘Family and Medical Leave Act’ was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on August 5, 1993. It is a labour law that requires larger employers to provide their employees unpaid leave for reasons including bereavement.Any eligible employee who takes a leave under FMLA is job-protected meaning the employee can return to the same position he held before the leave began. If the same position is no longer available the employer is obliged to provide a position with equal pay, benefits, and responsibility.
To be eligible for the FMLA an employee must be a part of a business with 50 or more employees within a 75-mile radius of his or her work site.
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The employee is also required to have worked for a minimum of 12 months and worked at least 1250 hours over that period of time. While the FMLA covers employees in both private and public sector with the exception of a few categories including elected officials and their personal staff members.
While the FMLA creates a blueprint for the security and benefits of employees, state laws are known to diverge or overlap with the FMLA requirements.
Often state laws apply to a wider set of employees, with relaxed eligibility requirement and can cover a broader set of family members. Conversely, state laws are also liable to not contain any additional rights.
According to the state law of Bereavement Leave, Florida state employees can take up to a 2-day administrative bereavement leave. For state employees, this leave is paid and is only eligible when a closed loved one passes away.
The aforementioned loved ones are strictly restricted to the death of a spouse or the death of a parent, grandparent, sibling, child or grandchild of either the employee or the employee’s spouse.
The Bereavement Leave Florida is only valid when the employee successfully fills out an administrative statement to the appropriate authorities which states the name of the employee and their relationship to the deceased, the employee may also be required to submit a death certificate or other appropriate documentation (e.g. an obituary). It is only when the statement is accepted is the bereaved allowed to take the paid leave.
There are also multiple Employee assistance programs (EAP) set up for state employees in Florida. Employers that have an EAP may consider offering the bereaved employees a grief counsellor through the program.
While paid leave does exist for state Employees in Florida, there is no such law pertaining to the private sector where employers are not enforced by law to provide with any form of bereavement leave. Hence, employees have the freedom to either deal with such a scenario case by case or to develop a bereavement leave policy as part of the employee benefits that they offer.
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In such circumstances, the employee will have to look into their contract and the employee handbook for the policy pertaining to the death of a loved one. If Bereavement Leave Florida isn’t granted even if the contract allowed it the employee will have legal grounds to file a court case.
