Atlanta Forum

The Family Medical Leave Act is a labor law allowing an employee to take unpaid leave due to illness or to care for a sick family member. It was one of the first bills signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

FMLA ensures that all workers are able to take extended leaves of absence from work to handle family issues or illness without fear of being terminated from their jobs by their employers or being forced into a lower job upon their return. The leave guaranteed by the act is unpaid, and is available to those working for employers with 50 or more employees. In addition, an employee must have worked for the company for at least 1,250 hours for at least the last 12 months.

To some FMLA is difficult to administer and — at times - understand. To others FMLA doesn’t go far enough to help families.

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Rob Gifford served as NPR’s China correspondent from 1999-2005. He is currently NPR’s London correspondent.

Gifford speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese and he has traveled from Tibet to the Muslim Northwest, to the border with North Korea filing news and feature stories for NPR News. Gifford also travels widely in East Asia for NPR. He has covered elections in Taiwan and East Timor, diplomatic visits to North Korea, and produced a range of features on everything from Christian missionaries in Mongolia to Internet start-ups in Hong Kong.

Gifford was born and raised in the U.K. where he worked for three years at the BBC World Service before moving to the U.S. in 1994 to attend graduate school. He also spent two years at NPR member station WGBH in Boston. Gifford holds a B.A. in Chinese Studies from Durham University, UK, and an M.A. in Regional Studies (East Asia) from Harvard University.

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