Charlotte company dinged for FFCRA violation

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, employers have been struggling with furloughs and layoffs and trying to understand their new obligations to provide some form of paid leave for coronavirus-related absences. In such an environment, it’s understandable some employers would miss the mark. That was the case with a Charlotte company that recently became the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Wage and Hour Division (WHD).

How we got here

In response to the health crisis, Congress provided relief to individuals in companies with fewer than 500 employees in the form of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) and the Emergency Family and Medical Leave Expansion Act (EFMLEA). The FFCRA provides workers with up to two weeks of paid leave, and the EFMLEA offers an additional 10 weeks of paid leave at two-thirds their regular rate of pay to care for their children whose school or care provider is unavailable because of the virus.

The new laws and their accompanying regulations arrived at the height of the uncertainty created by the pandemic.

Facts

As a result of the WHD’s investigation, industrial textile manufacturer Barrday Corp. paid $2,606 in back wages for wrongly denying paid leave to an employee who missed work to care for a child whose place of care was closed because of the COVID-19 crisis. The agency found the employer violated the FFCRA’s and the EFMLEA’s requirements by denying the paid family leave and later firing the employee.