I won the right to unemployment comp from my pitworthy former employer and thanks to hard-economic-times extensions it is still valid and ongoing.
I do a lot of short little consultation gigs (Craigs list, Elance, Dice, etc temporary jobs ranging from 10 minutes’ total work to 2 months’ worth of 35 hour weeks). NYS Dept of Labor instructed me to always log on once a week to claim weekly benefits and on that screen I am asked did I work more than 4 days during the week ending <end date> or did I earn more than $405 or some such amt during that week, and if I did so I don’t qualify for unemp bennies for THAT WEEK. So far so good and entirely reasonable on their part, I’d say. Thus, unemp comp works like a security blanket for weeks when I don’t manage to scrape together enough temp gigs to overearn, whereas when I do I go off the NYS dole and paddle my own economic canoe.
HERE’S THE PROBLEM: On Week X, I do well; I report that I earned oodles of money and/or worked 4+ days that week. On Week X+1, I log on and report that no, I only worked 0 or 2 or etc days and did NOT earn more than $405. Stupid irritating DOL system then apparently makes the following assumptions:
• I was “employed” during Week X but I’m not “employed” now, so I should please indicate that the reason I “lost my job” that I had during Week X is [pick one] that I a) got fired; b) quit; c) got sick or injured; d) lack of work. I have been putting “lack of work” as the best of the bad choices in the context of these wrong assumptions.
• SOME of the time (inconsistently), DOL then sends me a form via snail mail to fill out indicating that since I was employed during Week X but not now, I should please write down my most recent “employer”, their address & phone number, and what date I last worked for them. Now, in real life, Week X will most often not have involved work performed for one “employer” but instead 3 hours for his consultation client, 6 hours for that one (broken up into 11 sessions of 20-45 minutes), a half-day for a third, and 17 minutes for a fourth. Obeying the letter of the instruction, I put the info I have for the last person I did any work for during the designated time frame, who might well be the 17 minutes total job time client.
• SOME of the time (inconsistently), DOL then contacts my consultation clients. “Hello, this is the Department of Labor, a large bureaucracy within a large powerful populous state that may not be your own state. We understand that you ‘had an employee’, AHunter3, who is filing for unemployment compensation. Please fill out the following form pertaining to your former employee AHunter3. Did you withhold taxes on this person? Did you withhold unemloyment taxes? Did you file a W2 or a 1099? What benefits did you pay this employee? Has this employee notified you that he has resigned from your company, or did you discharge this individual? Did you notify this employee of his or her right to file for unemployment compensation?”
•Correspondence of that nature totally freaks out some of my consultation clients, many of whom are tiny little “companies” of 4 people who hired my services with all the formality with which someone would hire a neighbor’s kid to mow the lawn. They are terrified that they are about to become the next Kimba Woods investigation. Ohfuck, they say, are we gonna be hit with some kind of back taxes for not taking unemployment fees out of your paycheck or something? Heydammit, we didn’t hire you as a permanent employee, you’ve got a lot of nerve trying to file for unemployment and make our little company pay New York State etc, you knew from the get-go that this was a short-term job.
• So then I have to reassure them that it is nothing for them to be worried about. All the while hoping that, indeed, it is nothing for them to be worried about.
Bloody hell. That kind of puts a damper on the likelihood of them asking for my services next time they need someone with my skill set.
I asked NYS DOL themselves (over phone and in person this morning) and got the run-around about how best to deal with the situation: “I am sorry sir but I cannot tell you what to put on your forms” / “Sir, you just need to follow the prompts and answer the questions as best you can” / “No, those companies have nothing to worry about. It’s just standard practice and the DOL knows what it is doing when it asks those questions so just answer honestly.”
Bloody hell. Oh I said that already, did I?
OK standard disclaimers, you are not my lawyer even if you are a lawyer, all advice is informal, etc etc.; and you may or may not have any familiarity with the NYS Dept of Labor in any capacity. Having said that, is there a better answer I should put after one of those Week X type weeks and/or after one of those Week X + 1 type weeks? Someone suggested I should simply not certify during weeks when I worked ≥4 days
and/or earned ≥ $405, but I’m very leery of following that advice without knowing the administrative consequences in advance. (i.e., I sure as hell don’t want them to close my freaking case and then have to reapply and wait for them to consider all over again from the starting line whether or not I am due to receive unemp bennies in the first place, or to tell me that for failure to log in I have forfeited my claim and am assumed to be fully employed now, etc).