My question involves labor and employment law for the state of: Texas
I work for a large city in Texas. My department heads have instituted a policy that say if you use your earned Sick leave for x-amount of hours, you must provide documentation that states you were under a doctor's care. This policy was put into effect because some were abusing their Sick leave. Let me reiterate that Sick leave (along with Family, Vacation, and Holiday leaves) are earned by the employee at a given amount per pay period. To my knowledge, no other department in the city requires their employees to submit documentation to prove legitimate use of sick leave. The documents are submitted to a specific medical records clerk and stored in a file in her office. If you fail to turn in documentation after using the permitted amount of hours, you are banned from working voluntary overtime, which is a substantial hit to the paycheck. Essentially, my department is penalizing us for using a benefit we earned.
In my situation I was off injured. I filled out the documentation and put it into the intra-department mail delivery. Somehow it didn't get delivered so they levied the penalty against me. I'm working on getting it resolved.
Can they make us submit to such a policy when the leave used is what we earned? Is it discriminatory that they make this rule for us when the rest of the city employees don't follow it?
Thanks.

