Legal Question in Medical Leave in Florida

Re: Family Medical Leave as a referral and documentation

As you probably know, under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) your employer must give you a total of 12 weeks leave (paid and/or unpaid) for certain covered medical reasons. What I will guess is happening is that you have been taking paid sick leave for your medical problems that has not been designated as FMLA leave(that is not illegal). The problem for your employer is that if something should happen to you after using all your paid sick leave that has not been designated as FMLA leave, you will then still have all 12 weeks of unpaid FMLA leave available to you. By designating this recent paid leave as FMLA leave, it will reduce the amount of unpaid FMLA leave that might be available to you at a later date. Remember, you only get 12 weeks total paid and unpaid FMLA leave. Nothing illegal going on here, your company just wants to limit employee leave as allowed by law. As to your other questions, medical information should not go into your personnel file, the company should maintain a separate medical file for each employee. A company cannot retaliate against an employee for using FMLA leave or disapline an employee for taking FMLA leave.