Can a company legally terminate someone after being diagnosed with a terminal illness and after being out of work because of this illness and also after short term disability expired?

Is your company covered by FMLA? If you are not sure, here's a link that should help you determine if you are considered an eligible employer under FMLA: http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/whd/1421.htm#2a.

If you are a covered employer, the employee may be eligible for certain amounts of unpaid leave and job protections provided the employee meets specific criteria. The previous link goes over those requirements.

How much time has the employee missed from work? How long has he/she been employed by your company? Did he/she work at minimum 1250 hours in the last 12 months? Do you have 50 employees within a 75 mile radius of the job site in question?

OK, the company i'm speaking of is a large ship building company in south Louisiana. The employee is not me but my father in law who is now deceased (7-1-06). He was diagnosed with brain cancer in September and was operated on in October. As stated earlier he was put on short term disability and after that expired he was terminated. He did not qualify for long term disability because of his age (68). He worked for this company for years. His spouse is having problems now with getting life insurance from them. I hope this helps some.

The question is not how long he was able to collect disability payments. It's how much time he missed from work due to his illness. Under the Family and Medical Leave Act, the maximum amount of time that the employer had to hold his job was 12 weeks.

He never returned to work after the end of October of 05.

Was he a union member? If so, there may have been a retirement plan or even a disability plan attached to his benefits. That's worth exploring!

From what you describe it sounds that he would have easily exhausted all applicable leave options between October 2005 and July 2006. FMLA would have only protected his job for 12 weeks. Under normal circumstances, the employer may terminate employment if the employee is unable to return to work after FMLA is exhausted. I am truly sorry to hear of your loss, I'm just not sure that anything wrong has happened here.

Barring a bona fide contract that says otherwise, there are no circumstances whatsoever in which an employer is required to hold an employee's job indefinitely, regardless of the necessity for additional medical leave. Barring a state law that provides longer time (and Louisiana does not have one) 12 weeks is the maximum that an employer has to hold a job for medical reasons.

Disability benefits are solely income replacement while someone is on leave. They do not provide any job protection whatsoever. It's FMLA, not the disability benefits, that provides that. Once FMLA has been exhausted, there is no further obligation on the part of the employer to wait longer.

The law has to balance the rights of the employee to take medical leave with the rights of the employer to have someone in the job getting the work done.

I'm sorry to hear about your father in law; that's a terrible thing for anyone (and their family) to have to go through. But it does not appear that the employer has done anything illegal.

thanks for the replies, the information was really helpful.