Suspicious timing and a thin paper trail - but he still came up short
Firing a worker during family medical leave is risky. But one employer just showed it can still be lawful.
On July 28, 2026, the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit sided with a manufacturer that fired an employee while he was on leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act. The court upheld summary judgment for the company.
The story starts in 2021, when the employee joined the company as one of two process engineering technicians. In late 2022, after his father died, he began struggling with depression. His manager suggested he look into FMLA leave. He requested it in February 2023 and was approved through April.
About six weeks later, in mid-March, the company let him go. The termination letter said his "position ha[d] been eliminated."
He sued, arguing the company discriminated against him and interfered with his FMLA rights. His case rested on two things: the timing, since he was fired just before his scheduled return, and a thin paper trail.
The company's account was simple. Business had slowed, and it no longer needed two technicians. It kept the more senior one and cut him. That call, the chief research officer testified, came down "solely on seniority." The retained technician and the team leader both agreed there wasn't enough work for two roles. After the firing, the company shifted his tasks elsewhere and never refilled the job.
The court was not persuaded by the timing. A "mere coincidence of timing," it noted, rarely proves a link between leave and termination - especially where the slowdown lined up with the leave. The six-week gap, it said, cut against any claim that the leave drove the decision.
The documentation gap didn't save him either. The company had no records from late 2022 or early 2023 laying out the planned cuts, beyond the letter and a disclosure form. Its chief HR officer testified that she normally required managers to document who was chosen for a cut and why. Even so, the court held that a missing paper trail, on its own, does not prove the stated reason was false - unless the employee shows why the gap matters.
One more wrinkle: the decisionmaker gave unclear testimony about whether he knew of the leave, then used an errata sheet to say he had not. The court treated that as a clarification, not a credibility problem.
The employee also brought an interference claim. It failed for the same reason - the company would have made the same call regardless of his leave.
