The complaint, filed last Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, alleges that CSX inflated the amount of time employees were charged for FMLA leave, punished them for taking the leave, and terminated or suspended over 100 employees since 2017 on the allegation that they took FMLA leave fraudulently.
U.S. Department of Labor regulations generally require employers to account for FMLA leave using the shortest period of time that they use to account for other forms of leave. The complaint alleges that CSX, however, accounts for FMLA leave by the day instead of by the hour. So, for example, if an employee takes FMLA leave for four hours from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., CSX calculates the leave as two days instead of four hours, according to the lawsuit.
Beginning in 2015, CSX implemented an attendance policy that gives negative points for absences but allows employees to remove those points through subsequent uninterrupted attendance over a specified period of time, according to ...