Federal employees will continue to get paid sick leave to care for ill family members after the law authorizing family-friendly leave expires on Dec. 21, the Office of Personnel Management has announced.
Under the law, employees are granted 40 hours of paid leave a year to care for sick family members and to arrange or attend funerals. Employees can use an additional 64 hours of leave for those reasons if they have a balance of at least 80 hours of regular sick leave, giving employees a maximum of 104 hours, or 13 days, of family medical leave per year.
The Federal Employees Family Friendly Leave Act authorized family leave from December 1994 through Dec. 21, 1997. In June, OPM recommended that Congress extend the law.
Congress did not do so before adjourning in November, but now OPM says it doesn't matter. The agency has decided it has the regulatory authority to grant the leave.
In a Dec. 5 memorandum to agency personnel directors, Donald Winstead, OPM's assistant director for compensation administration, said OPM issued final regulations granting the leave before the law went into effect. Those regulations, he said, are therefore still good even when the act expires.
According to an OPM survey, 335,201 employees took advantage of family medical leave in 1996. Employees used an average of 28.9 hours (under four days) of leave to care for family members in 1996, up from 23.3 hours (3 days) in 1995. About 3 percent of employees who used the family sick leave used the maximum 13 days.
Last April, President Clinton asked agencies to extend employees an additional 24 hours of unpaid leave a year for other family obligations, including school activities, routine family medical needs, and elderly relatives' health care.
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