In a ruling that provides important early guidance on the reach of the Massachusetts Paid Family and Medical Leave Act (PFMLA), a Suffolk Superior Court judge in the Business Litigation Session has held that the PFMLA’s anti-retaliation protections apply only to “employers” and do not extend to individual employees of a corporate employer.

• The Massachusetts Superior Court held that the PFMLA’s anti-retaliation protections impose obligations only on “employers” as defined in the unemployment insurance statute, and do not extend liability to a corporate employer’s officers, agents, investors, or board members.
• The court distinguished the PFMLA from the Massachusetts Wage Act, which expressly deems corporate officers and agents to be “employers” of the corporation’s employees, language that is absent from the PFMLA.
• The court further rejected an aiding and abetting theory of PFMLA liability, noting that unlike Massachusetts’s anti-discrimination statute, which expressly provides for aiding and abetting liability in discrimination cases, the PFMLA contains no analogous provision, indicating the legislature did not intend to authorize such claims.
• The ruling appears to be one of the first decisions squarely addressing whether individual liability can attach under the PFMLA.

In its decision, Laughlin v. BinStar, Inc., the court also rejected the plaintiff’s attempt to assert PFMLA claims against the individual employee defendants on an aiding and abetting theory, reasoning...

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