Elizabeth Valles Shares her FMLA Journey

Elizabeth Valles interviewed by Elaine Shelly 

Elizabeth Valles cleans and prepares the west Texas apartment that serves as her family’s second home. Her husband, Cesar, will soon return from his military assignment in Europe. She knows that there’s the potential for danger in any deployment, including his present location that she cannot name. She brushes that thought aside. This break will be a happy time. She hasn’t seen her husband since last July. This will be a work break for both of them before they return to separate and demanding jobs. But it will also be a financially stressful time as she prepares for leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) with several weeks away from her job without pay.

“The financial aspect is very challenging with having three to four weeks of no pay,” she says. “Do we cut the internet off? What streaming services do we cut off? We are eating healthy, but do we change our grocery plan–go to Costo and buy a bag of dried beans and rice?”

FMLA was passed during the Clinton administration in 1993.  It was designed to allow workers time away from work to recover from serious illnesses or to take care of close family members. The legislation protects the worker’s job while they are away from work for up to 12 weeks. Unknown to many, the act also has special provisions for military families that not only allow for time off from work for illness or caregiving, but also allows military spouses and close relatives of the military member to take time off for military-related activities and deployments, called qualifying events. Qualifying events also include time off for military temporary leave, counseling and time needed for financial or legal arrangements stemming from the military member’s active duty. Elizabeth says she wishes she had known about these qualifying events when she was requesting time off for her husband’s deployment to Europe, but she had no knowledge of the FMLA coverage.

“I think I was thrown off by name. It’s called ‘medical leave.’ I had no idea it included non-medical and military,” she says.

Elizabeth says she and her husband run two households, one is in central Texas, close to her job and the other is near her husband’s military base in west Texas. She wanted time off last July when her husband was deployed to Europe, but she and her employer didn’t know that FMLA covered her situation. Elizabeth was left to make her own creative solutions for her employer. None of her suggestions were accepted. Finally, Elizabeth took time off from work and used her remaining paid leave days. Since she had not fulfilled enough work days in her employer’s fiscal year to qualify for paid leave, the vacation pay she received was deducted from her checks. Essentially, her time off was unpaid leave. Frustrated with this experience, Elizabeth started researching for solutions.

“It sparked my passion in bringing awareness and pushing for paid family leave,” she says.

Her research brought her to organizations, like Family Values @ Work, that advocate for paid leave. She also found out her rights as a military spouse under FMLA. While it was too late for her to use FMLA to see Cesar off to Europe, she now makes FMLA requests for time off as frequently as she needs.

While she had become adept at using FMLA coverage, she is acutely aware of the financial impact of unpaid leave. She wants military families to know about their rights under FMLA, but she’s also on a mission to push for paid leave. The US currently is one of 6 countries that have not enacted paid leave legislation on a national level. There are 13 states with paid leave, but Texas is not one of them.  

Elizabeth looks forward to talking to Texas legislators about paid leave. She is accustomed to the idea of working with legislators through her father’s work as a lobbyist. She plans to shadow him to pick up pointers. In all, Elizabeth hopes for legislation that will protect individuals emotionally. She feels that employers tend to look at leave requests as logistical and factual. The human element and emotional needs of the person requesting leave get lost, she says. 

“People turn it into this factual, logistical thing. I hate that part about it,” she says. “We need policies in place that protect us emotionally. Having laws in place that protect the emotional part of humanity is important.”