Sometimes employers' good deeds get rewarded

There is a common belief among defense lawyers who practice employment law and HR professionals who administer it that "no good deed goes unpunished." While that belief is common, it often is also mistaken, as the following case demonstrates.

Ill employee and her disabled daughter

Raquel Villarreal is the mother of a special-needs daughter with a number of illnesses. Villarreal started work at Tropical Texas as a program supervisor (apparently she needed to meet various client quotas to keep her job) in April 2016. Her performance was uneven, and Tropical counseled her in March 2017.

Starting in April 2017, Villarreal took protected Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) leave on an intermittent basis to care for her child. And unfortunately, she herself became ill and underwent surgery, which required more FMLA leave. Then her daughter required open-heart surgery, which accelerated the burn rate of her FMLA allotment. She ultimately exhausted all FMLA leave as well as other forms of employer leave on July 10, 2018.

Was she terminated on July 10?

When an employee exhausts leave and can't return, she can be terminated (consistent with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) obligations, which I will get to in a minute). But Villarreal was not terminated. In fact, she missed work on July 13, the 17th through the 20th, the 23rd, the 24th, and the 31st. Those were unprotected absences, and one manager stated she was a troubled employee and expressed suspicion she had abused the company's leave-without-pay policy for a trip to Arizona, not for health reasons.