The 5-4 decision is a setback for millions of employees of state agencies and state colleges, and it voided in part a provision in the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. Among other things the act said that employees had a right to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to recover from an illness or childbirth.
The rights of employees of private companies are unchanged by the ruling.
In this case, Daniel Coleman was fired from his job with the Maryland Court of Appeals after his request for sick leave was denied. He sued for $1.1 million in damages, alleging that his rights were violated under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act.
And why was Coleman's case thrown out?
Kennedy, in the majority opinion, dismissed the suit and said that Congress could not subject states to suits over personal sick leave because it had nothing to do with remedying a pattern of sex discrimination.
Indeed, Kennedy's opinion went on to say that the states' rights to be immune from lawsuits overruled the individual's rights for recourse if they were fired for actually taking extended personal leave under the FMLA. Because there is no discrimination at work here, states are immune from lawsuits on the matter. Kennedy stated that Congress in the FMLA included the provision to sue for recourse in order to remedy discrimination against women for taking extended personal leaves for illnesses. But Kennedy argues that there's no evidence states as employers were ever discriminating against women or anyone for that matter by denying strictly personal leave under the act. No discrimination, no lawsuit as a recourse:
Without widespread evidence of sex discrimination or sex stereotyping in the administration of sick leave, it is apparent that the congressional purpose in enacting the self-care provision is unrelated to these supposed wrongs.
The legislative history of the self-care provision reveals a concern for the economic burdens on the employee and the employee’s family resulting from illness-related job loss and a concern for discrimination on the basis of illness, not sex.
But more importantly (and ominously), Kennedy made the broad argument that federal law in this case put an onerous legal and financial burden on the states and that the states could not be compelled by the federal government to have to accept such a burden.
In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg argued that gender neutral-based leave laws indeed were discriminatory against men, and specifically that society was more likely to deny personal leave to men precisely because men were seen as "the stronger sex", and that the recourse to sue was necessary precisely because of cases like this.
Requiring States to provide gender-neutral parental and family-care leave alone, Congress was warned, would promote precisely the type of workplace discrimination Congress sought to reduce. The “pervasive sex-role stereotype that caring for family members is women’s work,” id., at 731, Congress heard, led employers to regard required parental and family-care leave as a woman’s benefit.Carol Ball, speaking on behalf of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, testified that she did not think “there are going to be many men that take up . . . parental leave.”
Still, the Kennedy argument worries me somewhat. It's a big jump to say that being sued is the same level of onerous burden that health care exchanges or the individual mandate constitutes a "burden" on the states.
But that's exactly the argument that opponents of the mandate are making. It's foreboding. Let's be honest, this is all going to come down to Kennedy again.
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