| March 29 -- The unemployment compensation
system that has served the nation so well for 65 years is imperiled, a victim of the
Clinton administration's attempts to expand the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA)
without input from Congress, witnesses told a House subcommittee recently. Representatives of the Society for Human Resource
Management (SHRM), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a state employment agency sharply
criticized the administration's proposal to let states pay unemployment compensation to
employees who temporarily leave the workforce to care for newborn or newly adopted
infants.
They urged Congress not to buy the
administration's argument that, because the national unemployment rate is unusually low,
parents should be able to get some of the compensation that historically has been reserved
exclusively for workers who were involuntarily laid off or fired.
If any state unemployment compensation (UC)
trusts are unusually healthy, they may not remain so for long, particularly if the economy
takes a turn for the worse, the witnesses said.
One witness, speaking for the Chamber of
Commerce, said a wiser use for surplus unemployment insurance (UI) revenues would be to
divert a portion into worker training programs that ultimately will support economic
growth, reduce the length of layoffs and boost wages.
Speaking on behalf of SHRM was Kimberley K.
Hostetler, director of human resources services for the Connecticut Hospital Association
(CHA).
She said SHRM and CHA "feel strongly
that tapping into the safety net for jobless workers to provide pay for an entirely
different program-employees on family leave-will endanger the solvency of unemployment
insurance trust funds, represents an inappropriate attempt to circumvent legislative
authority and violates both the original spirit of the [FMLA] as well as current
unemployment insurance law." |
Hostetler made some of the same points that she did last July when
testifying before a Senate subcommittee examining various proposals to change or expand
the FMLA.
At the earlier hearing, she said the FMLA was a "target for abuse" because the
Department of Labor (DOL), through its regulations, has created an unreasonably broad
definition of "serious health condition" (see HR News, August 1999, page 7). During the March 9 hearing before a House Ways and
Means subcommittee, Hostetler repeated her earlier criticism that the DOL regulations
allow employees to use unpaid FMLA leave for minor health problems that Congress didn't
originally intend for the law to cover.
"Extremely broad Department of Labor
regulations and guidance on the definition result in employers being required to certify
all kinds of mild or minor conditions as FMLA-protected, including such things as bad
colds, simple outpatient procedures ... and vague diagnoses of 'depression,' 'stress' or
'back pain,'" she told the Human Resources Subcomittee. Hostetler said Congress
should make a number of corrections to the FMLA, as currently written and interpreted by
DOL, before even contemplating the Clinton administration's proposed Birth and
Adoption/Unemployment Compensation (BAA-UC) Rule. She urged Congress to:Tighten the definition of
"serious health condition"-one purpose for which FMLA leave can be used-to what
Congress intended when it enacted the law in 1993.
Change the law to give employers three
weeks, instead of two days, to retroactively designate absences as FMLA leave and to
provide written notice.
Take steps to prevent abuses of
intermittent leave, whereby an employee receives an open-ended certification from a
medical provider indicating that time off should
(Continued on Page 5) |
