In Praise of FMLA

In 1993, US President Bill Clinton signed into law the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). This was one of his first acts as president, and it was the fulfillment of a campaign promise to provide more protection for working families. His predecessor, George H.W. Bush, vetoed it twice despite widespread support for the bill. 

Signing this act into law was, unfortunately, the pinnacle of Clinton’s progressive agenda. He went on to gut welfare and pass NAFTA. Clinton’s presidency is a textbook example of neoliberal abandonment of poor and working class Americans, and by default, almost the entirety of the middle class. 

But at least we have FMLA.

It’s not a model program by any stretch. The leave is unpaid and the benefits are limited to 12 weeks. Only certain workers qualify and even if they do, many employers are exempted. In the 30 years since its enactment, FMLA has not been expanded at the federal level beyond a few provisions for service-members and deployment. 

Even so, I praise the FMLA because it contains one particular provision that is saving me right now: leave for a worker’s own serious health condition. 

You Don’t Need It Until You Do

Just a few weeks after getting COVID in July 2022, I went back to my usual schedule. In the office three days a week, working from home two. Problems appeared immediately. My ability to function began deteriorating by early afternoon, sometimes even earlier. This would happen no matter my location but it was considerably worse on days I commuted into the office. 

Strange bouts of dizziness hit me without warning. I’d forget what I was working on, blank out mid-sentence, lose track of where I was in a task. Headaches would grip my skull and blur my vision. I made countless small mistakes and a few rather staggering ones. 

And then there was the fatigue. The absolutely overwhelming, knee-buckling fatigue. Sometimes I had to lay on my office floor just to stop the room spinning. When I would leave at the end of the day, I’d wobble as if drunk to the parking garage. Now recalling the many times I drove home so compromised makes me cringe with shame. 

This mysterious post-viral condition worsened, flummoxing every medical specialist I saw. Suddenly FMLA mattered not just to my pregnant colleagues but to me. The application requires medical justification so I had to hunt down my doctor and work with her on it. This was no small feat. But several in-person appointments, a video call, and one epic email correspondence later, we had the application complete. Then it had to go through my workplace HR for approval. 

At first, my FMLA was intended to be intermittent, meaning I could use it to schedule breaks or go to appointments. I tried for many months to flex my schedule this way but my health did not cooperate. Work was piling up, as were the mistakes, the headaches, the fatigue, the cognitive impairment. Under the guidance of my doctor to rest (“please rest, you really need rest, Shannon”), I met with my supervisors and team to hash out a plan to take several months off to recover.

I am now wrapping up my fourth week of medical leave. 

Just having time off isn’t the panacea we had hoped for. This illness is brutal. It’s taking considerable effort to master proper rest and to identify triggers of impending crashes. But challenges aside, lifting the work pressure is giving the many traumatized systems of my body enough of a break to at least start to heal. Little by little, I can feel that accumulated stress untangling and sloughing off. I very much wish I had done this back in summer 2022. If only anyone had known what was coming.

The FMLA Safety Net

For those of us in the US, what’s terrifying about getting sick is not just that our health will deteriorate, but that we’ll lose everything. The marriage of health insurance to employment means precarity on all fronts for the chronically ill. There’s a good chance that if we’re not partnered with or otherwise related to someone who can support us when we get ill, we’re shit out of luck. We end up having to choose between losing our homes or going to work sick or injured where we get sicker and more injured.

But it’s not like we’re safe if we work while compromised. Chronic illness rarely aligns well with the punishing attendance and performance standards of US employers. Every state in the country, including Washington, DC, has at-will employment. That means an employer can terminate an employee anytime and for any reason as long as it’s not illegal. There are some exceptions to this on a state-by-state basis but those are for things like whistleblowing or joining the National Guard. Beyond that, protections for workers in the US are a joke. And if we really can’t work, it can take up to three years to get through the labyrinthine disability benefits process to see if we qualify (or more likely don’t) for an income that can barely cover the cost of groceries. 

FMLA is a deeply flawed law. Even so, it has a few points that provide considerable peace of mind for someone who is dealing with a serious medical condition:

• My employer is required to keep providing my health insurance benefits and make the same contributions to my plan
• My position (or a similar position that has equivalent pay, benefits, and responsibilities) is protected
• Other benefits are also available while on leave and will still be there when returning to work
• I am protected from retaliation for taking FMLA leave

I work for a good organization and report to lovely supervisors. I’m confident that even without FMLA, they would do the right thing. But faith in the goodwill of my employer is not protection. If someone up the chain decides they don’t believe in Long COVID or figures it would be easier to balance the budget by just eliminating my position since I’m out anyway, they can’t legally act on that. My job will be there while I’m out and it will be there when I return. 

The People Behind the FMLA

We don’t have FMLA because of Bill Clinton. We have it because labor organizations, women’s rights groups, progressive politicians and lots of on-the-ground grassroots activists busted their asses to make sure leaders heard voices of real people and not just corporate shills. I am thankful to every one of them. They kept the pressure on so that I can be here 30 years later, recovering with knowledge that my job is safe. For at least a couple more months.

We have a long way to go in the US to get functional, meaningful worker protections. FMLA, like the 40-hour work week, minimum wage, Social Security, and Title IX protection, offers at most a most threadbare safety net. And even these federal programs are not guaranteed. They only continue to gasp for life because people like you and me make sure our leaders continue to listen to us. Let’s commit to doing as well (or even better) for the folks who come next.

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If you want to know more, here is a thoughtful overview of the history of the FMLA from the Organization of American Historians (2015).

There are a number of ways to get involved in activism around paid leave. Here is one place to start: https://nationalpartnership.org/economic-justice/family-act/