I began working in July at a company that offers short-term disability coverage. When choosing my benefits that month, I included this in my package. I found out in August that I am pregnant- after I had signed up for STD coverage. When I began planning for maternity leave last week, I noticed my benefits say that my "effective date" is in September. Do you think my leave will be covered, since I signed up before I was pregnant, or am I out of luck because it did not become effective until after the fact? There is a pre-existing condition clause.
You need to talk to human resources or whoever handles the benefits for your company. Without all of the details of the policy your company offers, there is no way for us to tell you if you are covered.
You need to ask HR about this.
Companies have all sorts of plans and we can't tell you if you are covered or not.
One person may be covered when another person with same circumstances is not covered with a different company.
Your best bet is to read your policy and talk to HR.
Best wishes to you with your pregnancy!
Call or email your HR person. We don't have access to your policy/benefits information so how would we know?
Congratulations on your pregnancy!
You need to talk to YOUR COMPANY HR.
FMLA - assuming your company has more than 50 employees - MIGHT work for you. However you have not worked for the company for more than 12 months, so according to the law? FMLA does NOT apply to you, in my opinion.
http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs28.pdf
IF you really live in Illinois? Here are the state laws for pregnancy leave:
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/illinois-family-me...
Your best bet is to sit down with your HR department and figure out what they cover, how they cover and what their rules are.
Good luck!
Does your company not provide for Maternity Leave specifically? I was under the impression that most companies did give 4 to 6 weeks Maternity Leave.
Only your company would know their policy. Ours you earn it so you would only have a few days available. Other companies charge and it is like insurance. Generally the effective date is when it becomes available so as long as you didn't have the baby before September you would be fine.
Obviously, go talk to your HR to find out the specific details of your policy. However, you aren't officially diagnosed as "pregnant" until the doctor confirms it which probably wasn't until September at the earliest. In my experience with two pregnancies, my leave was always covered under my short term disability policy.
policies are pretty diverse. no way of anyone knowing without being familiar with your particular coverage. call them, or your HR department.
khairete
S.
Maternity leave for us basically IS short term disabiilty. For us, vaginal birth = 6 weeks STD, C-section is 8 weeks. If you choose to take time after that, it's FMLA, which is unpaid, unless your company has some kind of polity around it.
As long as you go out after the effective date, you should be fine. But check with HR to be certain.
Only your specific company knows the answer to that question.
It is so odd to me to even expect to be paid while off from having a baby. I guess paying a little each month towards that expense through insurance is good, it still strikes me as odd.
When we started thinking about getting pregnant we had to take into consideration that we would be off work a minimum of 6 weeks without pay and our vacation would only cover a week or two of that.
We didn't have any sort of "disability" anything to cover our absence from work. We weren't there so we didn't get paid. Our husbands didn't get any time off work either. If they didn't work they didn't get paid.
So I think that everyone who has this sort of insurance or benefit through their job is very lucky.
