Introduction

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) was enacted just under six months ago in the wake of closings prompted by the then new coronavirus pandemic. As most employers know, the FFCRA created leave rights for many employees of employers with fewer than 500 employees for absences caused by the virus and its aftermath.

The FFCRA was itself a large and complicated bill, assembled in a remarkably short period of time, that borrowed aspects from the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Not surprisingly, the bill failed to answer a number of questions posed by employers and employees alike, and during the weeks that followed its enactment, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) issued scores of FAQs addressing many of those questions, and on April 1, 2020, only two weeks after the bill’s passage, it issued regulations that, for the most part, echoed the statements made in the FAQs. We have addressed many of those matters in this firm’s own FAQs about the FFCRA.