Teleworkers Protected Under Wage-and-Hour, Leave Laws, DOL Says

Employees who work from home retain the protections of federal wage-and-hour law and continue to accrue hours that go toward eligibility for job-protected family and medical leave, the US Labor Department said in a staff bulletin.

The Fair Labor Standards Act guarantees pay for all hours worked and short rest periods, and the right to take breaks to pump breast milk in a private place, Jessica Looman, principal deputy administrator for DOL’s Wage and Hour Division, said Thursday.

“Protections under the FLSA apply equally to employees who telework as to employees working at an office, factory, construction site, retail outlet, or any other worksite location,” Looman said in a memo to senior division staffers.

The directive underscoring those legal protections for teleworking employees reflects the normalization of remote work following the surge in working from home during the early months of the pandemic. About one in five private sector jobs involve telework at least some of the time, according to a 2022 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Eligibility for taking job-protected leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act depends on amount of hours worked, as well as working at a location where the employer has at least 50 employees in a 75 mile radius.

A teleworking employee’s home isn’t considered their work site for FMLA eligibility, according to the WHD memo. Rather, the work site remains the office to which they report or from which they get their assignments, it said.

“The count of employees within 75 miles of a worksite includes all employees whose worksite is within that area, including employees who telework and report to or receive assignments from that worksite,” Looman said in the memo.