Apr 5, 2023 | Family, Federal Government, FMLA, Grief
By Prerna Shah
When a loved one dies, many family members seek bereavement leave to attend to family affairs, their grief, and sort through the many changes that invisibly unfold behind closed doors. It may be surprising to learn that most employees have no legal right to take leave, except in five states in America (learn more about state bereavement laws here).
The Family Medical Leave Act, also known as FMLA, provides job and benefits protection for 56 percent of the United States workforce; however, bereavement is not an eligible condition for job or wage protection. Many may be surprised to learn that newly bereaved families have no legal right to take leave to cope with the death of a loved one.
So, what is a newly bereaved family member to do?
In honor of National Employee Benefits Day, Evermore sat down with Jeff Nowak, an FMLA expert, who provides legal strategies and solutions for employers of all sizes across the globe, for an in-depth conversation on all aspects of FMLA.
1) What is the FMLA?
FMLA is a federal law that provides up to 12 weeks of leave to an eligible employee in a 12-month period. There are a number of reasons why you may be eligible for FMLA job protection, including
- An employee’s own serious health condition,
- the employee has to care for a family member with a serious health condition, or
- due to pregnancy,
- bonding time after childbirth or adoption, or placement into foster care, and
- a qualifying need due to the active duty of a spouse, child, or parent.
While FMLA generally covers all public-sector employers, it also extends coverage to private employers that have 50 or more employees in a 75-mile radius. In general, to be eligible, an employee must have worked for at least 1,250 hours over the previous 12 months.
2) Does FMLA offer bereavement leave?
No, generally, FMLA does not specifically provide bereavement leave; however, Department of Labor statements and legislative history indicate a miscarriage is classified as a “serious health condition.” As a result, both miscarriage and stillbirth — two conditions before independent life begins — should be eligible for FMLA bereavement leave if the birthing person is unable to work because of her own “serious health condition” (e.g., physical recovery from miscarriage and/or labor and delivery, emotional distress). Paternal coverage may be extended if the spouse is caring for a loved one with a serious health condition.
For most bereaved families, however, bereavement is not an eligible event for FMLA job or wage protection.
Novak shares, “Oftentimes, employers have their own bereavement leave policies. Generally, these policies cover one to three days of bereavement leave, but that is not enough for most people. FMLA can be invoked to cover bereavement leave if the employee has a serious health condition like depression or anxiety, but you would need to invoke the ‘serious health condition.’”
3) How can you best communicate with your employer after a loss?
Communication is key.
According to Novak, “It’s so critical that the employee simply communicates upfront. Be candid with your employer. I’m hurting right now. This is a really difficult time for me, I can’t keep my attention on my work when I’m dealing with this loss in my life.”
“Some of us are fearful of that, right? We’re fearful of what the employer may do. We are in fear of losing our job as a result. But it’s important to characterize what you’re dealing with; if you need to start using words like, “My mental health is at issue here, or I just need to leave for my own mental health.” I tell employers that that line alone triggers an FMLA obligation. Now we potentially are in an FMLA-protected situation.”
Novak suggests that it’s beneficial to involve the HR team: “It’s important to be in full communication with the HR team. Look at your FMLA policy and find out, who does your employer want you to communicate with?”
Candid and open communication with the employer can make a difference; however, only share what you feel comfortable with. When the employer understands that coping is inducing mental distress, that’s when FMLA may be triggered, and this affords the employee job-protected leave.
4) What compensation is offered through the FMLA?
Leave associated with FMLA is unpaid.
When someone close to us dies, families often incur unexpected costs like funeral expenses, moving property or estate titles, among others. Novak shares, “By its very nature, federal FMLA is unpaid. And that remains (so) today. And I would say for the foreseeable future, federal FMLA is going to be unpaid.”
Nowak adds, “As a result of Congress being unable or unwilling to pass a paid leave law at the federal level, we’ve seen quite a bit of growth at the state and local level when it comes to paid FMLA leave.”
If you are able to take bereavement leave, it’s important to keep in mind that employers have no legal obligation to pay the employer during their leave.
Nowak notes that while a handful of states have passed their own FMLA laws, others have passed paid FMLA laws and others have provisions for paid sick leave (learn more about state bereavement laws here).
Nowak says, “It’s likely that we may see a paid leave law that involves contributions from either the employer or the employee or both sharing (contributions) that provide the funding for paid leave.”
5) Where can I find out more information?
For more in-depth coverage of our session with Jeff Nowak, you can head to our YouTube channel, and don’t forget to subscribe while you are checking our videos. We regularly update our channel with resources from experts working in the area of grief and bereavement, and our ‘In the Know’ sessions are very popular and informative.
On our website, you will also find many relevant and expert-led resources on FMLA – miscarriage and stillbirth, state laws and legislation related to bereavement leave, U.S. military bereavement leave guidance, general information on grief, how community leaders can help, our national grief support directory, books on grief for adults and children, our most recent achievements in advancing in bereavement care, and more.
Please also help spread the word about FMLA and bereavement leave, have these conversations with your colleagues and coworkers on this National Employee Benefits Day.
Mar 10, 2023 | Family, Federal Government, Grief
By Terri Schexnayder
Often, when someone dies, we seek to support the grieving family in a meaningful way. In a sign of solidarity and love, we attend memorials or funerals, send condolences, prepare meals, and sometimes participate in athletic events or donate to fundraisers for a related cause.
When a child or teenager loses a parent, their lives can be upended. Beyond losing the relationship, a child may experience food or housing insecurity, loss of healthcare, or even logistical challenges attending after-school programs. Their school may struggle with compassionate policies and procedures and seek to have the student return to school as soon as possible to ensure educational continuity (see our list of helpful ideas for compassionate schools here). Even university students report similar challenges following a death (see Evermore’s efforts in advancing bereavement support among universities here).
Yet, there is a little-known economic benefit that a bereaved child may be eligible to receive if either of their parents participated in the United States workforce. This Social Security benefit is available to some bereaved children, payable upon their parents’ death. However, some experts project that more than half of America’s parentally bereaved children are not receiving the benefit, resulting in upwards of $15 billion in benefits not being conferred to bereaved children and families).
More than 2.2 million children in the United States today have experienced the death of a co-resident mother or father. Dr. David Weaver estimates that 45 percent of children with one parental death receive the Social Security Administration (SSA) benefit, and 49 percent of fully orphaned children receive the benefit. Why so many children do not receive their eligible benefits is poorly understood. In some cases, families do not know about the benefit, or an administrative error denies an eligible child. In other instances, bereaved children or orphans do not qualify because their parents did not achieve fully insured status. This means that either parent did not earn enough wages to receive the benefits.
According to the SSA, an unmarried child may be eligible for benefits if they are:
- Younger than age 18;
- 18-19 years old and a full-time student (no higher than grade 12); or
- 18 or older with a disability that began before age 22.
Once the child reaches age 18, they will no longer be eligible to receive benefits unless they are a student or disabled.
If you know a child who has experienced the death of a parent, please share Evermore’s guidance on how to apply for these benefits. Also, consider sharing SSA’s application for benefits with their caretakers.
SSA guidance states, “A child can receive up to half of the parent’s full retirement or disability benefit. If a child receives Survivors Benefits, he or she can get up to 75 percent of the deceased parent’s basic Social Security benefit.”
Weaver’s study revealed that “when Social Security and other government programs are accessed, evidence suggests that child well-being is stabilized, thus plausibly facilitating better educational, health, and economic outcomes—a benefit not only to individuals, but also to the nation in terms of elevated human capital, productivity, and innovation.”
“It takes a village to raise a child. The potential for lifelong success, well-being, and prosperity depends on us — the community — to support a grieving family. As the nation reels from concurrent mortality epidemics, it’s important to understand the public benefits system, especially for our nation’s most vulnerable children,” says Joyal Mulheron, Executive Director of Evermore.
Resources:
SSA Blog Post: Social Security Pays Benefits to Children After the Death of a Parent
SSA Fact Sheet: Benefits for Children
Evermore Fact Sheet: How to Apply for Child Survivors Benefits
Parental Mortality and Outcomes among Minor and Adult Children
Dec 20, 2022 | Advocacy, Appropriations, Community, Data Collection, Family, Federal Government, Grief, Research
In 2022, our community of supporters has grown by more than 50 percent for the second consecutive year. Our movement consists of people from every corner of America – from truck drivers to professors to homeschoolers and executives. We unite in solidarity to create a more compassionate world for those who will follow us. What do we do with the pain of loss? We create change.
We’ve done that in 2022, and we are on the cusp of much more. This year has been the most consequential yet in the advancement of bereavement policy, and we could not have made it this far without you. As we reflect on 2022 and look towards 2023, there are some bright spots we want to share with you:
- We are winning mindshare among our nation’s most esteemed federal health leaders. In an event hosted by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), our founder and executive director Joyal Mulheron, had the distinguished opportunity to provide a private briefing to key U.S. Department of Health & Human Services agencies on bereavement policy, research, and statistics. As an emerging social and health concern, it is imperative that government leaders understand the complexity of bereavement policy and its impact as it crafts and prioritizes its response.
- With Evermore’s support, Congress is directing the federal government to establish credentialing standards for grief therapists. Supporting bereaved people requires specialized training, which is not currently required for mental health practitioners. We are thrilled that Congress has directed federal health leaders to create universal eligibility standards to bring consistent and quality care to all grieving people.
- For the first time, Congress is encouraging CDC to collect bereavement data because of Evermore’s advocacy. Adding bereavement exposure to CDC data collection provides key demographic data and trends by race, geography, chronic disease risk factors, identity, and age, for example. A recurring data set of this magnitude will facilitate a better understanding of the scope of the problems connected to bereavement, and it will inform future policymaking and program priorities and investments.
- With Evermore’s support, Congress is directing federal health leaders to write the nation’s first report on grief and bereavement. COVID-19 and the nation’s concurrent mortality epidemics have impacted millions of Americans, yet grief and bereavement are not prioritized in our nation’s health policies, programs, or funding initiatives. This report will provide a holistic evaluation of the scope of the issue, the populations impacted, and the interventions offered to support grieving children and families.
- We are fighting for consumer rights, protections, and price transparency in the funeral industry. In almost every state in the nation, funeral homes are not required to publicly share their prices before a bereaved family walks through their doors, thereby leaving newly bereaved families vulnerable to price gouging and spending on services they don’t need or want. Evermore is preparing comments to submit to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on why funeral homes should be required to share pricing information publicly. This proposed amendment may substantially protect bereaved families during times of loss and crisis.
- Evermore releases America’s Forgotten Orphans, a free 58-page report, to bring childhood bereavement to the attention of federal lawmakers and agencies. In collaboration with Penn State and the University of Southern California, we identified a 22-year trend in increasing childhood bereavement across every state in the nation and among every racial and ethnic population. Childhood bereavement, and bereavement generally, have been a long-standing public health and social concern hiding in plain sight.
- Evermore releases free fact sheets and tools to calculate childhood bereavement in your own jurisdiction. We’ve developed 51 state fact sheets that help state and local lawmakers assess and better understand childhood bereavement in their jurisdictions. In addition, we’ve provided tools allowing local champions to calculate the prevalence of childhood bereavement in their school or Congressional districts.
- We are bringing the nation’s experts in grief and bereavement to you. This year we launched In the Know, a monthly video series featuring some of the nation’s experts in grief and bereavement, including luminaries like Megan Devine, one of our nation’s most respected grief leaders, and Dr. Toni Miles, who helped pioneer bereavement epidemiology.
- Evermore’s national grief directory continues to be a top resource for grieving children and families. Our comprehensive grief directory features more than 300 nonprofit resources across every state in the nation and continues to grow.
- Our weekly newsletter keeps our community connected, learning, and engaged. This year we launched a weekly newsletter to provide insights on bereavement science, policy, and community action. Our readership continues to grow as our stories and information aim to transform our nation’s systems toward supporting the lives of bereaved children and families.
We are not sitting on the sidelines and hoping change will come. We are actively working to advance these critical developments with respect and credibility each day. As we close out 2022, we want to thank you for making our work possible. Unlike other health and social concerns, bereavement policy and law are not funding priorities for any philanthropist or foundation we can find. Instead, people like you solely fund our movement.
We will continue our work building a healthy, prosperous, and equitable future for all bereaved people in 2023. If you would like to support our work in the coming year, you can make a donation here.
We wish you and yours a warm, healthy, and restorative 2023!
Sep 6, 2022 | COVID, Data Collection, Federal Government, Grief, Research
Just How Many People In America Have Lost A Loved One?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is one of the nation’s most-trusted, science-based sources of data on public health in the United States. For more than 70 years, this government agency has been monitoring the nation’s health landscape and providing guidance to the public on how to prevent and respond to health threats. It collects myraids of data on national health trends, including mortality rates related to homicide, suicide, substance misuse, maternal mortality, accidents, and more. Yet, while it collects how we die, it does not collect who survives these deaths and what the implications are.
With concurrent mortality epidemics touching every neighborhood in America, millions of people have experienced the death of a family or friend, but exactly how many people are impacted? We don’t know. What adverse outcomes do people experience in the aftermath of death? We have to look to academia or to other international registries to better understand the ramifications of losing someone meaningful.
“We all know the saying, ‘what gets measured, gets done,’” says Evermore founder Joyal Mulheron. “Bereavement is a public health concern hiding in plain sight simply because we are not measuring the scale or impact that losing loved ones has on our society.”
For example, to understand how many people have been impacted by COVID-19, we can look at the findings from a research study conducted by Ashton Verdery of Pennsylvania State University, Emily Smith-Greenaway of the University of California at Los Angeles, and Rachel Margolis of the University of Western Ontario. They find that for every one COVID-19 death, approximately nine survivors were impacted by the loss of a grandparent, parent, sibling, spouse, or child. But the study’s authors suggest that this is actually a significant underestimate, and likely more individuals are impacted, on average, by a single death. We also know that family survivors are more at risk for poor physical health outcomes, premature death, and other adverse consequences that can alter their life course.
For COVID-19 alone, more than 9 million individuals lost a loved one to COVID-19, including an estimated 78,000 children who lost a parent. This indicates that a significant portion of the population has been impacted by not only loss and grief, but in many cases by the loss of income and health care benefits (if the deceased individual contributed to household earnings and held a job with insurance). This is why we need sound data collection — to provide a clear picture of the impact in order to shape a federal response.
In order to develop sound policies and practices for supporting loved ones after a death event, our nation requires consistent and reliable data on the prevalence and consequences of death and bereavement. We need to know how many people are impacted by different types of death epidemics so we can see a more accurate picture of the true impact.
“When we lose someone meaningful in our life, it can irrevocably alter our health and our social and economic stability for years, decades, and in some cases, impact our well-being for the rest of our lives,” says Mulheron. “The more we know, the more we can help children and families.”
Collecting statistics on bereaved children, parents, siblings, and spouses could help Americans better understand the associated outcomes and impacts, such as housing and food insecurity, health care coverage loss, educational hardship, incarceration, substance use, suicide attempts, and premature death. These statistics are also crucial in helping us better understand what can be done to support bereaved people.
TONI P. MILES, MD, PHD
In 2021, Evermore made legislative strides, using the U.S. budget process as a vehicle to advance CDC data collection. Using work piloted by Toni Miles, M.D., PhD, formerly of the University of Georgia, Evermore advocated for the inclusion of bereavement epidemiology in CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS). BRFSS is the nation’s premier survey tool to collect data from 400,000 adults living in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and three U.S. territories. It is the largest continuously conducted health survey in the world.
Dr. Miles’ work preceded the COVID-19 pandemic, but found that 45 percent of Georgians — or 3.7 million Georgian residents — were bereaved in the last two years. She found that bereavement disproportionately impacts African American families with 58 percent reporting a recent loss.
“Dr. Miles’ work is very important because it enables policymakers to narrow and focus solutions to help bereaved families,” says Mulheron. “For example, Dr. Miles’ preliminary evidence found that 53 percent of those with a recent loss were out of work. This demonstrates the need for more compassionate employer policies, but also the need for Congress to add death of a loved one as a qualifying event to the Family Medical Leave Act.”
Ultimately, the budget provision passed Congress, but with no funding for CDC to include bereavement as a measurement on BRFSS. In budgetary legislative language, Congress is encouraging CDC to collect bereavement data, but it is an unfunded mandate that CDC is not obligated to follow.
“Still, this is a legislative victory and CDC is beginning to pay attention to bereavement and its impact,” says Mulheron. “As a nation we are beginning to recognize that death is not simply a mental health issue. It creates vast uncertainty for an individual’s health, social, and economic well-being. We will continue to fight for America’s families. It’ll take time, but we will get there.”
Additional resources
Tracking the reach of COVID-19 kin loss with a bereavement multiplier applied to the United States, Ashton Verdery, PhD, Emily Smith-Greenaway, PhD, Rachel Margolis, PhD
Estimates and Projections of COVID-19 and Parental Death in the US, Rachel Kidman, PhD, Rachel Margolis, PhD, Ashton Verdery, PhD, Emily Smith-Greenaway, PhD
Evermore’s Bereavement Facts & Figures
