In my experience, where a need to give notice exists, and this is a legal requirement after a certain period of employment, normally three months, the period of notice being dependant on the length of service, where an employee gives notice to terminate their contract, and if this notice is assumed to be the legally required two weeks, the employer is free to ask the employee to vacate the premises at their (the employer’s) discretion, immediately if so wished.
The employee is however still legally employed by the company for the remainder of the notice period an is entitled to pay at the contracted rates. The employee is therefore ineligible for unemployment benifit prior to the end of the period of notice.
Any holidays accrued are paid in addition to the fourteen days notice.
Where an employer terminates a contract immediately, the standard fourteen days notice is still in operation and must be honoured, as well as in some cases, severance payments being an obligatory requirement. This is usually a condition of the employer/employee contract.
Different conditions apply where an employee is fired for actions or behaviour that contravene the conditions of employment covered by the employers terms of employment and covered by the employment contract or referred to therein to an employers rules and regulations book, as long as such rules and regulations do not conflict with employment legislation.
In Rhode Island, if your employer denies you the two weeks, they don’t legally have to get paid for it. I know this, because I called the Board of Labor when I was told to only work one week of the two. Rumor is that in Massachusetts that the company has to pay you, but you know how rumors can go, especially with legalities.
There’s a lot of bad information here, especially in recent responses. Anyone who relies on what’s been said here would be making a mistake. As kunilou and Ghanima have said, the law in this area varies from state to state, so responses that talk about personal experiences in Wyoming (or wherever) are of limited value outside that state.
Employment law isn’t my area, so I’m not going to try to answer the OP’s specific question, but I can’t let some of these clearly incorrect responses stand without comment. True Brit seems to be from the UK, and his advice may be correct for an OP in Leeds (although I doubt it), but our OP appears to be from the US, and TB’s response makes no sense under the law of any US state that I’m familiar with. I found Myglaren’s post difficult to follow but (to the extent I understood it), it made no sense under any state’s law I’ve ever heard of. Generally speaking, there is no legal requirement in the US that either the employer or employee give any notice of termination of the employment relationship, not even after Myglaren’s three month period. (If there’s a written contract governing the relationship, the parties can specify whatever they want as far as notice, but this is not that common.)
You know, there’s an awful lot of GQ questions that I have no idea how to answer. As shocking as this may be to some people, that means I don’t answer them. There’s no shame in that. There’s other questions about subjects that I’m fairly well-informed about, or at least know the area better than 99% of people out there. Still, if I’m not sure about the answer (maybe because it concerns another state’s law or bureaucratic procedures), I’m still not going to answer unless I have the time to confirm my guess, as educated as it might be. At the very least, my response is going to clearly state the limits of my knowledge.
C’mon. This is GQ. We’ve got an amazing panel of experts on everything from criminal procedure to commercial power generation. But Una doesn’t opine on Batson challenges, and Bricker doesn’t give us his views on the merits of Southern Illinois bituminous coal. That’s a good thing. More people should follow their lead.
In New Jersey you would be payable until the date you told your employer you would be leaving then then you would become ineligible to collect. You may want to search for the Ask the Unemployment Employee thread I started a while ago
Get fired from a state agency? Hmmm… It is tough, most have the policy that even if you do something blatent you get counseling or probation, about the only people I’ve ever seen fired were just grossly incompetant.
I work for the Dept of Labor in Missouri. For the situation in the OP is possible to get unemployment, but it will almost always go up in front of the appeals board. From there it is their decision. As was stated, a person has to be wrongly fired, laid off, or quit under duress for them to be able to receive unemployment. There are always exceptions though, as I’ve seen cases where I wouldn’t have paid it, but they got paid, and cases where they deserved it and didn’t get it.
If you don’t get paid after quitting, why would you get paid after being fired? If you quit a company to take a higher paying job and are laid off from that company, the former company gets charged for unemployment according to a formula based on the time worked at each company.
You pretty much answered my questions in the remainder of the post. As I now understand it she was going to work for a competitor, but she had a contract stating she couldn’t take information with her. I assume this means the contract covered what would happen if she quit. As I stated an employer does not take kindly to someone going to work for a competitor and this employer tried to get by with breaking the contract. That explains everything.
And just how did I misrepresent Mississippi unemployment? I said that unemployment is not paid unless the firing is found to be unfair. That is what happened in the example you gave. Unemployment compensation is for employees who have lost their job thru no fault of their own. If the employee quits that is their doing. If they are fired for good cause that is their fault.
In most states the law states that the employer can fire anyone for any reason, not covered by Federal Law (race, sex, age, etc.). So the only argument is concerning unemployment compensation. In over 25 years of running a small company I had less than 10 people contest my saying they were fired or quit (actually none in this case). Of those over half did not show up for the hearing and I only lost one case, which was ridiculous, but hey you can’t expect to win them all.
For the record I always did everything possible not to layoff an employee, but a few times it was unavoidable. In those cases, I told them how to apply and did everything possible to get their unemployment (after all I’d been paying into the system)*. In a couple of cases, I even found jobs for the employees I was laying off.
[sup]For those no familiar with the system, every company has to pay into the unemployment fund. There is a minimum paid by companies that are just starting out or have not laid off any employees for a prescribed period. If you do lay off an employee that is computed into the rate you pay in the future. A few employees laid off doesn’t increase the amount much. Some businesses that are in seasonable businesses have large layoffs and their contributions naturally are very high. For instance we had a lawnmower manufacturer in our area. You knew what time of year it was by how many of their employees were applying for jobs. They paid well, so these employees were going to quit you after 6 months.[/sup]
When I quit my job a few years back, my company acted like a bunch of little bitches (this is after they just layed off half the department). I gave 2 weeks notice but after a few days they asked me not to come in any more. I basically demanded that they pay me the two weeks anyway and they did.
