Untangle Web of California, Local, Federal Leave Laws

California leave laws are intended to help employees, not confuse HR professionals, according to Trisha Zulic, SHRM-SCP, CEO of Efficient Edge HR & Business Services Inc. in San Diego. But coordinating leave compliance can get difficult.

Coordination of Leave Requirements

During a session at the SHRM Annual Conference & Expo 2024 (SHRM24) in Chicago, Zulic reviewed California’s bevy of state leave laws, such as ones providing:

• Job-protected pregnancy disability leave (PDL).
• Job-protected California Family Rights Act (CFRA) leave to eligible employees to bond with a new child.
• CFRA leave for a child, spouse, domestic partner, parent, parent-in-law, grandparent, grandchild, sibling, or someone else related by blood or in a family-like relationship (“designated person”) with a serious health condition.
• CFRA leave to care for the employee’s own serious health condition.

Memorize the list of eligible family members, Zulic said. She noted that many individuals eligible for CFRA leave—such as domestic partners, parents-in-law, grandparents, grandchildren, siblings, and designated persons—are not eligible for leave under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).

It’s a good idea to ask who an employee’s designated person is during open enrollment, Zulic said, and stipulate that the designated person can’t be changed in a 12-month period unless they’ve died.

There are a host of local leave laws in California, as well. For example, San Francisco has a paid parental leave law that applies to employers with 20 or more employees worldwide, noted Justin Hurd, SHRM-SCP, associate director of human resources with Episcopal Community Services of San Francisco. “San Francisco is its own microcosm of employment laws,” he said.

State and local leave laws also must be coordinated with workers’ compensation laws and federal leave laws such as the FMLA and the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act. Leave also may be required as a reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Laws’ Application

With California’s leave laws, it’s important to understand which laws might apply in different circumstances. If an employee is pregnant, PDL can run concurrently with FMLA leave, Zulic noted. She said if PDL applies, then CFRA leave doesn’t apply. If HR remembers that, leave calculation is simplified, Zulic noted.

If CFRA leave applies, it also may run concurrently with FMLA leave.

For small employers, state and local leave laws may apply when the FMLA is inapplicable. For example, the CFRA applies if there are five or more employees, while the FMLA applies to private-sector employers with 50 or more employees for at least 20 workweeks in the current calendar or previous calendar year, in addition to its other eligibility requirements. 

An organization with five employees is going to struggle when one is out on CFRA leave, Zulic said.

CFRA and FMLA leave may be taken intermittently, which is another administrative challenge.

While the CFRA and FMLA certification forms resemble each other, they are not interchangeable, Zulic cautioned. She recommended having a leave packet at the ready for employees who give one day or less of notice that they need to take leave—a common occurrence, she said.

PDL applies to all private employers that have employed at least five or more full-time or part-time employees for each working day in any 20 consecutive calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year. 

It’s easy to think of PDL leave as four months off, but Zulic said employers instead should specify it in terms of hours or weeks off—693 hours or 17.33 weeks—in order to be more precise.

Some HR professionals dread the math that comes with leave calculations. Zulic urged them to “get with the metrics. Get with the stats. Get comfortable with it. Embrace it.”