Preserving great care time for federal employees
Interesting news on care time – my nickname for the right to take time off work to care for someone else’s health without getting fired.
Federal employees have long had one of the best care time policies – they have been allowed to leave to care for their “spouse, and parents thereof; children, including adopted children, and spouses thereof; parents; brothers and sisters, and spouses thereof; and any individual related by blood or affinity whose close association with the employee is the equivalent of a family relationship.”
AtMP has long encouraged this definition to be included in the Family and Medical Leave Act so it would apply to all workers.
This week the Office of Personnel Management issued a clarifying regulation “to promote consistent application of policy across the Federal Government, and to allow the Federal Government to serve as a model employer” by “making the definitions of family member and immediate relative more explicit to include more examples of relationships that are covered.” Fortunately, OPM notes
that it would be very difficult to list each and every type of family member or immediate relative, as it would be very difficult to consider all the variations of a contemporary family. The fact that a specific relationship is not expressly included in these definitions is not meant to diminish the familial bond, or to imply that leave may not be used to care for a person with that relationship.
It is also really great that OPM spells out that it
does not normally require proof of a domestic partnership for the purpose of leave administration. For example, an agency does not typically request specific documentation to prove an employee’s relationship with his or her family member (e.g., parent, spouse, sister, brother). We find that agencies are in the best position to administer their own leave programs and should follow the same procedure for all employees.
I certainly hope that more employers will look to OPM as a model!
making the definitions of family member and immediate relative more explicit to include more examples of relationships that are covered
June 26th, 2010 at 8:06 pm
I thought I’d include the below from the abstract from the Lily Kahng paper, with the purpose of highlighting the first sentence. I was especially impressed that almost all developed countries (besides the U.S.) manage to do without the joint (married couple) tax return.
Her paper also explains that the joint return was sort of a historic accident — a way to try to solve a problem in the inequitable treatment of married couples in community property states compared to common law states — a problem created by two Supreme Court rulings (see PDF pages 4 and 5) for more on that). Anyway, the solution to this problem — the joint return — exacerbated the problem of inequitable tax treatment between marrieds and unmarrieds / singles that we’ve been struggling with now for more than 60 years.
———— Quote from Abstract: ——–
The United States is one of the few developed countries to retain the joint return, available for heterosexual married couples only. Since its adoption in 1948, its underlying assumptions have been challenged on many valid grounds, and yet it remains firmly embedded in mainstream political and policy discourse. In recent years, most of the debate surrounding the joint return has focused on reducing marriage penalties, bonuses, and who among the universe of couples ought to be extended the benefit of the marriage bonuses. The treatment of single people has received almost no attention.
The scant attention paid to single people is striking in light of the most recent U.S. census data, which indicate that they are nearing a majority of the adult population, a trend one demographer describes as a “clear tipping point.”