This is a hypothetical question about how the law around unemployment works. I’m not actually in this situation, and I’m sure the answer varies from state to state, but I’m curious about the process.
My understanding of unemployment benefits is that you can get them if you are laid off, but not if you quit or are fired for cause. That is, if your job goes away due to something you couldn’t control.
I was reading a thread on reddit about people who quit their jobs on the spot, and one story that stood out to me was someone whose boss changed her hours dramatically. Like, from a M-F 9-5 to W-Sun 1-10pm. Which obviously didn’t work for her schedule and she quit. And someone else suggested that it was probably designed to make her quit, so he wouldn’t have to lay her off and pay unemployment.
But it seems to me that she ought to get it anyway. Would she? What’s the line? How much can your job change without it essentially not being the job you were doing any more. Does the schedule ever matter?
I think the usual formulation is that you can still be eligible if you quit because of a material change in your conditions of employment. You might have to file an appeal to get someone to actually think about that, though.
I know PA fairly well, and I’m not sure if this is true everywhere. Your unemployment eligibility and amount of pay is determined using the first four of the most recent five quarters. You have to have worked all of those quarters in order to qualify.
The best bet is to file a claim and let the pros figure it out. If you’re denied because you haven’t been working for long enough (or in the right quarters), I’m not sure an exception can be made. But if you quit, or get fired for cause, the employer may not deny your claim.
I know somebody who was fired, was denied unemployment by the employer, and appealed. The employer didn’t show up in court, so the employee won by default.
In the UK that is called “constructive dismissal”. It is not enough to show merely that an employer has behaved unreasonably. There must be a fundamental breach of an express contractual term, or the implied term of “trust and confidence”, and you must have left because of the breach; you have to make it clear when you resign that you regard yourself as having been “constructively dismissed”.
In my state ( and I think it’s typical ) you can get unemployment as long as you didn’t actually quit and as long as you weren’t fired for misconduct. I use “actually quit” to mean in wasn’t a case of constructive dismissal and being fired for misconduct means you were fired for stealing or not showing up for work or for violating a policy. You can get unemployment if you were fired for incompetence.
In practice I’m sure it varies a lot. A former co-worker of mine once got fired, ostensibly for refusing to return to work after undergoing radiation for breast cancer. What actually happened is that instead of allowing the poor woman to take the paid disability leave that she should have been entitled to, management lied and said she had refused to return to work and then contested her unemployment benefits.
Luckily the Unemployment folks believed my friend, and she didn’t get her job back, but at least she got her benefits.
My sister also once had a crazy situation in which she was hired for a conference planning job, and told that she would have to front expenses for a trip to a conference a week or two later (flights, hotel, etc.) She didn’t have that kind of money or a credit card, and said so, and requested that the company pay her travel expenses. They refused and fired her. Again, the Unemployment folks believed her, and she got her benefits (but not her job back).
The answer to ANY question like this is both highly fact-dependent, and state-where-it-occurred-dependent. Any attempt to answer it without those details is simply guessing in the dark.
I realize that. I was looking for some general principles, and the idea of a “material change” is what I was hoping for. Obviously, what’s material is going to be hashed out based on lots of details.
I’m retired from California EDD. I realize this is hypothetical, but it is real for someone every day. In California there are two things the dept looks at to start paying a claim: your wage history to establish the monetary claim, and the reason you left your very last employer. If you take a subsequent, temporary job and are then laid off, the circumstances around leaving the job that established the monetary basis of the claim are no longer in play. The replies above about changing the conditions of employment would be in play, but is is hard to predict how it would be decided by an Adjudicator. If you prevail, the employer can appeal, if the claimant doesn’t prevail, in a case with mushy facts, they should always appeal. The Appeals Judge sometimes has more discretion than the original Adjudicator, and in my experience, most of the people in the system at all levels are looking for fairness.
If you lose, you can still draw on the claim if you go back to work, earn a certain amount of money and are again laid off. The claim lasts for a year, the money for no more than six months.
Once a claim is payable, the claimant must be able to work, available for work and actively seeking work in order to be eligible for benefits that week.
This is a common misconception, but the usual wording is ‘through no fault of your own’, not ‘fired for cause’. For example, if a company hires you or shifts your job so that you’re supposed to write database scripts, but you’re not able to do that, firing you because you can’t do the job is firing you for cause, but you’d be eligible for unemployment. If you lied on your resume about being able to write database scripts, they could fire you for lying on your resume, which would then be for a cause that’s a fault of yours, and you wouldn’t be eligible. If a factory decides that it’s going to require everyone to make 3600 widgets per hour, and you can only make 2400, then you’re fired for cause, but still eligible for unemployment. If you’re deliberately failing to make widgets when you could, then you’re choosing to be insubordinate (or otherwise violating policy) and would be ineligible for unemployment.
Generally if your average number of hours drop that drastically, you’re eligible for unemployment anyway because you’re no longer earning a full-time salary. There’s also a concept called ‘constructive dismissal’, where it’s determined that the employer is attempting to make job conditions so bad that the employee quits instead of being fired, and the employee quitting is not treated as voluntary.
The rules for this and exactly what happens varies from state to state, but in general you file for employment, if the company doesn’t contest it then you get it, if they do then you’re denied and have to file an appeal, and at that point there’s a hearing where someone looks into the opposing claims of what happened. A lot of people don’t understand that the initial denial is really more like ‘they say you don’t qualify, if you disagree with them then appeal and we’ll look at the merits’ and not ‘you don’t get it, go away’. Beyond an initial phone hearing, the case can escalate to in-person hearings and eventually an actual lawsuit in front of a judge.
Another interesting tidbit from the Land of the Free. For contrast, in Canada Unemployment Insurance is a government run system. the only input the employer has is to indicate whether you quit, were fired for cause (serious offense), or laid off. That last one gets you unemployment. After that, the employer has no say. There are exceptions for people who quit for harassment, unsafe workplace, etc.
Similarly, the “tax” rates for UI are generic, rather than applied back to the employer. So, an employer has no reason to try to screw over a departing employee except maybe personality clashes.
A friend of mine relates the story of a socially inept computer network manager he knew of, who told his bosses how their backup and disaster recovery process sucked. They ignored him, so one day he brought down the network and servers and they were offline for a day. When hey figured out that he did it, they told him he could go quietly and they would indicate he was laid off on is separation slip, or else he was fired - no IU. He went quietly. After they changed all the network passwords, they put “fired” on his UI form.
I’m not seeing the “contrast” here. What you described is the same as what everyone on this thread is saying about the USA. If you lose your job through no fault of your own, you can get unemployment based on your recent salary. If you lost your job and it was your fault, you can’t get unemployment. So, you’re telling us it’s the same in Canada. That’s not contrast.
Okay, that might be different between the USA and Canada. My Unemployment tax rate is partly based on how many claims I’ve had recently, although there’s a range of rates. Here in Oregon, the range is from 0.9% to 5.4%, depending on claims. New businesses start out at 2.4%
In CA, at least, they would do a Telephone hearing on that or even if they employer claimed cause.
And yes, there’s a good chance she would prevail. And if she already had a new job, so the unemployment would only be for a month or so, I think IANAL she would collect. This is CA, however.
Yes, I had a relative who ran an office in Idaho bitching about a secretary who hired on and left and was going to cause his UI insurance rate to go up. I thought that was so weird and basically an incentive for employers to screw over departing employees - as if the land of no separation pay didn’t have enough ways to do so.
Canada got rid of “quit and get UI” in the early 1980’s, I think it was - about the time the more right-wing newspapers started reporting on things like the “UIC Ski Team”, guys who would work summers, take the winter off paid, and proudly wear actual jackets specifically (sarcastically) made to say that on the slopes of Banff.
I read in Harpo Marx’s autobiography that on a lark he applied for unemployment when he was between pictures. It was under his birth name and without the wig so he was unrecognized and told to keep looking for work and come back in two weeks.
During the two weeks they shot one of their Paramount pictures, then he was at liberty again. Asked if he had found work, he replied, “Yes, but it was a temporary position and is done now.”
“How much did you make?”
“$50,000”
I don’t recall if he got the unemployment benefits.
Generally if you’re being paid in very large single lump sums, you’re doing contract work, not work as a regular employee where you would be eligible for unemployment. Its really doubtful that anyone writing an actor a $50,000 check would be recording them as a regular employee and paying UI taxes on it, and if they’re not then it wouldn’t count as work or salary history for UI, so he wouldn’t qualify.
I work with finding people jobs so this comes up a lot, as I place people in clubs and hotels and restaurants quite often.
In my decades of experience, an unemployment claim for that would be denied if the hours were substantially changed. In the above industries, you usually have 7a-3p, 3p-11p and 11p-7a (with minor variations).
When someone gets switched from the am (7a-3p) to afternoon (3p-11p), I have never heard of them quitting and getting unemployment. Even for reason like inability to find child care, however when they are switched from one of the two above shift to the overnight shift, it almost always results in the ability to get unemployment.
Of course over the years, I’ve seen very weird results, so it really depends which arbitrator you get. I’ve seen two people fired for the same exact cause, same exact circumstance, one gets unemployment one doesn’t. It really is going to depend on the arbitrator.
Most companies will fight every claim, even if it’s justified, so the real verdict comes on appeal. But I’ve seen pretty big companies not fight any because their HR is a mess so it always pays to apply.
Truthfully most people, including myself, make enough errors daily, that if someone wants you fired, a good manager will have no trouble doing it and doing it so you don’t get unemployment.
FWIW, I quit my job ten years ago to start my own business. I found out there was a program that would provide financial help for starting a business and applied for it. But the program was only offered for people who had been approved for unemployment (it was designed to help people on employment to get off of it). I thought I couldn’t get unemployment because I quit, but they told me sometimes you can get approved anyway, for example if your employer pressured you into quitting or put you in a situation where you had no choice but to quit. I explained that I quit because I was tired of enabling my boss’s unethical business practices. They considered it but denied my claim. They might have approved my claim if I could have documented the unethical practices better or if it had been more severe.
Eighteen months later, I found out my previous employer had been operating without a license. If I’d known that at the time, I possibly could have used that as a more solid basis for my unemployment claim. But by then it was too late, the 15 month window had expired.
Yep, 11 months* into my first call center job I was given the choice of either resigning or being terminated since my sales sucked; I was warned if I picked the latter I wouldn’t be able to use them as a reference and they fight every UI claim. So I “resigned”, applied for UI anyway, my claim was denied, then I one on appeal because nobody from the company bothered to show up (also the hearing officer specifically told me that wasn’t really a resignation).
*At 12 months I would’ve been eligible to transfer to a non sales job.