In an issue of first impression, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled recently that the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) requires that a service member must be paid for time on military leave if his or her employer provides employees with other similar types of paid leave. The Seventh Circuit’s ruling is the furthest along in a series of similar USERRA lawsuits pending in the federal courts around the country, all brought by a group of prominent plaintiffs’ law firms.
USERRA is the federal law that protects the employment and reemployment rights of employees who have been called to active military duty, and dictates that an employee absent from work for military service is entitled to the same “rights and benefits” as other employees on a comparable “leave of absence” and which are provided pursuant to an employer’s “agreement, policy, [or] practice….” Up until now, while USERRA’s “equal benefits” rule clearly entitles employees on military leave to maintain their employee benefits, USERRA has not been interpreted to include pay within the meaning of “rights and benefits.”
Members of the Center for Workplace Compliance (CWC) can read more here.