When an Employee Abruptly Requests FMLA Leave after Being Given a Sucky Work Assignment, Can He Safely Be Terminated?
Meet Ray. Ray is to the FMLA as Patrick Mahomes is to football. Ray is an FMLA pro, having taken FMLA leave a total of 158 times over three years. No joke. F-M-L-A simply rolled off Ray’s tongue, enabling him to take leave on countless occasions. As the story goes, Ray started his latest FMLA journey with a three-week leave of absence for pneumonia. Ray worked as a mechanic, regularly operating and repairing the loin-puller machine for his employer, Swift Pork Company. Ray must have loved that loin-puller machine, since he got really salty upon his return to work when his boss told him he would be assigning Ray to a different machine at the plant. Accusing his employer of “punishing” him for being absent three weeks for his illness, Ray announced that he would “take a vacation until [the employer] figured it out.” [Whatever that means . . . ] His vacation request was summarily denied, since it was not requested in advance as required by policy. Ray then used the old stand-by: FMLA leav...