A Wistful Plea For A Model Leave Act

Writing a company policy that would address the current patchwork of local, state and federal laws about employee leave would take dozens of pages, and it would take a determined policy wonk to apply it, muses Jackson Lewis partner Michael Soltis,. Too bad the U.S., by way of a federal leave law, doesn’t follow the example of what the UK did vis a vis discrimination law, and put it all in one basket. The social policy isn’t the issue, according to Soltis. Rather, when “more than 450 federal, state and local laws give employees the right not to come to work for a variety of reasons,” it creates a major compliance problem, especially for companies with multi-state operations. In lieu of a federal law, he says, a model state law would be an improvement and is a more realistic prospect.