Family and Medical Leave ActFMLA

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is a United States federal law, enacted in 1993, that guarantees eligible employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave in a 12-month period for qualifying reasons while protecting their job and group health benefits. Qualifying reasons include the birth or adoption of a child, caring for a spouse, child, or parent with a serious health condition, an employee’s own serious health condition, and certain military-family situations, for which longer leave can apply.

The FMLA applies to private employers with 50 or more employees within a 75-mile radius, and to public agencies and schools. To be eligible, an employee generally must have worked for the employer for at least 12 months and 1,250 hours. The leave is unpaid at the federal level, though some employees use accrued paid leave concurrently, and a growing number of US states now run their own paid family and medical leave programmes on top of the federal floor.

The FMLA is US-specific. India provides comparable protections through different statutes rather than a single equivalent — most notably the Maternity Benefit Act, which grants eligible women paid maternity leave, along with paid-leave entitlements under state Shops and Establishments Acts and, for covered workers, sickness benefits under the Employees’ State Insurance scheme. A GCC in India therefore administers Indian statutory leave rather than the FMLA, even where its US parent offers FMLA leave to its domestic staff.