An employee informed his manager that he needed surgery and wanted to schedule a medical leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). The following day (in a heart-warming display of sympathy and understanding), a company HR manager conducted a forensic search of the employee's work computer and found a pornographic e-mail message that he had sent to a co-worker a year earlier. The employee was fired on the spot. He sued the company and five individuals -- the president/CEO, HR director, an HR representative, plant manager and health-benefits manager -- for, among other things, retaliating against him for requesting FMLA leave.

Last week a federal court upheld the employee's claim and refused to dismiss the individual defendants from the suit. The court found that because "each of the defendants exercised control over plaintiff in the decision to terminate him," they could be liable as the "employer" under the FMLA.

It should be noted that the court's ruling was on a motion to dismiss, which required the court to accept the employee's allegations as true for purposes of ruling on the motion. Whether the employee will succeed at trial is yet to be seen, but the decision is nonetheless an important one because it establishes that managers and HR representatives can be held individually liable for violations of the FMLA.

For a summary of the case, see http://ow.ly/1e9px. For manager training on the FMLA, see http://ow.ly/1e9ru.