Dive Brief:
- An ex-manager of a Mattress Firm store in Florida who asked for Saturdays off to take her teenage son to DJ classes can’t move forward with her claim of Family and Medical Leave Act interference against the company, a U.S. district court judge determined Sept. 15.
- Several issues doomed the worker’s claim, the judge said. For one, the district manager and an HR director had decided to terminate the worker before her FMLA request was known to them. For another, “no reasonable fact finder” could conclude the music classes were an FMLA entitlement, the judge said, as they were not prescribed and the son was not in continuing treatment for a serious medical condition.
- FMLA requests can be some of the trickiest for HR to navigate. In the case of Pantoja v. Mattress Firm, time and documentation were on the company’s side. “By the time [the manager] bothered to tell anyone the kind of facts that could conceivably implicate FMLA leave, Mattress Firm had a litany of reasons to fire her and had resolved to do just that,” the judge said.
Dive Insight:
While the judge in the case found the music classes did not rise to the level of qualifying for FMLA leave, they weren’t entirely unrelated to medical need.
According to the undisputed facts of the case, at some point during the COVID-19 pandemic, the worker’s son was briefly held for mental health evaluation and treatment under Florida’s Baker Act. After his release, the employee worked briefly with a therapist to find activities that might be beneficial for her son’s mental health. She and her son eventually landed on DJ classes, which proved to be “therapeutic” and which the worker consequently prioritized.
Crucially, though, no healthcare provider prescribed the classes.
“At all relevant times, the child was not under the care of a psychiatrist or a therapist,” the judge found. “He was not in any prescribed course of treatment. In fact, the child stopped seeing the therapist around the time [the worker] started taking the child to the DJ classes.”
In addition, the worker did not share this medical information with the new supervisor who ultimately terminated her employment, saying she “did not feel comfortable sharing” it and saying only that she had regularly not worked Saturdays because they were important to her as family time and for her son’s music.
The manager allegedly butted heads with her supervisor over scheduling, rejecting offers of a demotion with more flexibility or the ability to stay in her current role without the flexibility. “I guess you’re going to have to write me up then, because there are going to be days I’m going to need a Saturday off,” she said at one point, according to court documents, during a conversation the supervisor called “verbally abusive, loud, and aggressive.”
She also “made vague reference to her child’s mental health,” the judge noted. Following the conversation, the manager submitted an FMLA request to the company’s third-party vendor. But the supervisor did not find out about the request until he was already on his way to fire her, records showed.
Documentation and timing can often make or break an FMLA lawsuit dismissal for employers. For example, Amtrak recently prevailed on a worker’s FMLA claim after the company was able to show a record of attendance policy violations and related warnings.
In another case, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a district court’s finding of summary judgment for a Texas city in 2023, determining that the decision to fire an employee within minutes of her not showing up following 12 weeks of FMLA leave raised questions about why it really fired her. The worker and city reached a settlement in that case roughly a month after the 5th Circuit’s decision, court documents show.