Human Resource Blog

Michigan Maternity Leave

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Can we establish a company policy that all pregnant women have to start maternity leave 1 month before their due date, and end it 2 months after their due date?

Different births and different personal goals determine different maternity leave schedules. Some mothers-to-be prefer to take as much of their leave as possible after the birth of the child, to spend most of the time bonding with the newborn. In other cases, pregnancy complications may require a mother to take most of her leave time before the birth. Still other mothers simply choose to take some leave before the due date and some after.

And they are entirely within their rights. If you were to develop the kind of schedule you describe, you would be violating at least two federal laws.

One of them is the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1986, otherwise known as the FMLA.  The other is the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, part of Title VII of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964.

Under the FMLA, women are guaranteed 12 weeks of job-protected, unpaid leave at the time of birth. The timing is to be determined by the mother and the doctor, not the employer. The law applies to any business with 50 or more workers, although some states have widened it to include smaller firms as well.

The PDA, on the other hand, says that you as an employer must allow a woman to return to work as soon after her child’s birth as she chooses and is physically capable. As her employer, you have the right to require a doctor’s statement showing that she is, in fact, physically able to return to the job. Doctors generally recommend that women take 6 weeks off after a birth without complications and 8 weeks after a caesarean section, but those are strictly guidelines and not rules. The law says that you as employer “may not institute a rule that prohibits a woman from returning to work for a predetermined length of time after childbirth.”

It would be just as if an employee of yours were to suffer a heart attack. You would not tell him how long to take off. The same applies to pregnancy.

The PDA applies to any workplace with 15 or more employees. JH