Any manager can tell you that scheduling and maintaining operations while one or more employees are on leave granted by the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) can be difficult. A recent case, however, points out the pitfalls that can await unwary supervisors who improperly take an employee’s FMLA leave into consideration when making business decisions – or even appear to do so.

Lower than expected state revenues in 2008 and other conditions led to a state budget deficit that resulted in several agency-wide job abolishments, which led to many appeals to the State Personnel Board of Review (SPBR). Many of those cases have been finally decided and provide guidance on questions that bedevil human resource employees. Reviewing the body of decisions as a whole, some themes emerge that will help state agencies as they undertake abolishments in the future.

The “cat’s paw” doctrine is a theory of liability that allows an employee to prove discrimination in an employment decision where the decisionmaker herself is unbiased. Under the theory, the discriminatory motive of a non-decisionmaker is imputed to the decisionmaker (and employer) where the discriminator has some significant influence that leads to the adverse employment action.

While the Congressional debate over health care reform focused on the public option, mandatory insurance, and other hot button issues, tucked away in the new law was a provision that imposes new requirements on many workplaces with new mothers. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (HR 3590) provides mothers the right to express breast milk for a full year, during an unpaid “reasonable break” in a private place (i.e. away from the public and co-workers) that is not a bathroom.

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) has flown under many people’s radar. The low profile may be, in part, because GINA’s effective date was delayed by eighteen months, to allow the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to develop regulations. So, flurries of interest surrounding GINA’s May 1, 2008 signing date may have dissipated by its November 1, 2009 effective date