paid family leave?

The Family Medical Leave Act is a Federal program. You are allowed time off to bond with adoptive and foster children. I recently wrote about how I am taking time off to spend time with my son. [url=http://foster2forever.com/2012/04/fmla.html]Foster Care | Family Medical Leave Act | Behavior Issues[/url]

I was able to take the entire summer off with our daughter when she came to us via FC. My companies FMLA though was unpaid...but it held my job when I came back. Normally FMLA is unpaid leave. If you have another benefit where you'd get paid I guess you can use that. I used 1 week vacation time and rest of the 10 weeks was unpaid for me. It just guarantees your job is still there (or an equivalent one is available when you return).

Federal law allows for 12 weeks of job protected unpaid family leave. California allows for 6 weeks of paid leave that is not job protected. The federal and California leave overlap, so basically you can take up to 12 weeks (under federal law) with 6 weeks (under California law) being paid in a way similar to unemployment.You will receive about 66% of your normal pay. Your normal pay is calculated using your total earnings in the highest quarter of the 12 months prior to your date of leave, so it can end up being more than expected if you earned any bonuses or had a lot of overtime during one quarter. In my case, my FMLA pay ended up being nearly 100% of my normal wage because I worked a lot of overtime in the preceding December and got a large Christmas bonus.There is a one week waiting period to start collecting benefits, so the first week is unpaid. This means that to collect your full 6 weeks worth of benefits, you will actually be off for 7 weeks. After the paid benefits end, you can choose to go back to work or take an additional 5 weeks (for a total of 12 weeks) unpaid under the federal FMLA program.You cannot be denied the leave so long as your employer has more than 50 employees and you have a qualifying event. The placement of a child for foster care or adoption counts as a qualifying event. You have up to a year to take your leave and you don't have to take it all at one time. You must give your employer as much notice as possible before taking leave; however, if no notice is possible (i.e. a child is placed without notice and you want to start taking leave immediately) then that is okay.I told my employer when I was still going through training that I would be doing fost/adopt and that I would need to take FMLA upon placement (my agency required it). I warned them that I would be able to give little or no notice. This gave them the opportunity to prepare by backup training someone for my position. We also discussed the possibility of me working from home for the 6 weeks if placement occurred during our busiest season. They could not require that I do this, but I was more than happy to because it meant I could delay my FMLA to later and get more time home with the baby. They were very supportive and it took a lot of stress off me to know that they were prepared and onboard with what I was doing.

One note - in California you must be paying into state disability (OASDI on paycheck stub, I believe) in order to qualify. As a teacher, I do not pay into this and therefore do not qualify for paid leave. I believe there are other jobs who are in the same boat so check with your HR department to be sure you qualify.

San Francisco is making progress to ensure that more employers make up the difference so that one can get 100% paid leave for 6weeks.