If the angry, desperate, frustrated, disgusted, frightened people posting on California’s Employment Development Department Facebook page on on EDDsucks.com are any indication, this particular state agency needs a major house cleaning, audit, retraining, and revamp of massive proportions.
https://www.facebook.com/californiaedd?fref=ts
Is it like this in every state?
Not in Missouri, by golly. Our state representatives decided that we don’t need unemployment at all, and voted to cut the benefits period from an already skimpy 20 weeks (the national average is 26 weeks) down to 13 weeks.
No point in being angry, desperate, frustrated, disgusted, or frightened in my home state. There isn’t enough unemployment to get bothered about.
Good username/thread combo.
Ours isn’t like that. Well, not on Facebook. They don’t use their Facebook page to answer questions or anything, just as a PR machine for the governor. I assume it’s just as bad if you call or e-mail them, though.
I don’t have any fresh experience with this stuff.
But when I was laid off in 2003 in Missouri (ref post #2), the process was simple and effective. The state retraining folks were intelligent, informed, friendly, not overworked, and helpful. Starting and stopping my unemployment payments, and obtaining my state funded retraining from private training companies was painless. I had nothing but good things to say about the whole process.
This despite several thousand folks all getting dumped the same month from the same employer in one concentrated area serviced by one state benefits office. And this still being the heart of the post 9/11 downturn, so we weren’t the only layoff victims that year. Which downturn was thought of at the time as being pretty severe, until overshadowed by the much larger Great Recession of 2007.
My only complaint then was how pissed I was to be (IMO wrongfully) laid off from a real good job. That and the fact my unemployment payments covered what I usually earned in the first 2 days of the month. The other 28 days I was on my own. That seemed kinda skimpy to me.
Huge hassles here! A few months ago I took a temp assignment for a few weeks, then it ended. It was a short term assignment and never intended as otherwise.
When I reopened the UI claim, I was asked if I was fired, laid off, or quit. No option for none of the above so I went with laid off. I was told that the agency is required to submit some kind of papers when an assignment ends and the employee goes back on unemployment. Their options are limited as well and from what I can tell they have to check a box as to whether the employee is actively seeking work. Like they have any idea what else I’m pursuing outside of this one job.:rolleyes:
So anyway, some stranger at the agency’s corporate office tells them I am not looking for work. Their own recruiter, who actually knew me, didn’t even know why the rep had said that.
I have proof that I applied for 20 jobs in the month in question, and had 6 interviews.
More than enough documentation exists that I am seeking employment. However, the state rep kept telling me that if Agency X says I am not seeking work, then I’m not, no matter what everything else points to.
2 hourlong UI interviews and several faxes (cause that’s more secure than email, you know) later, I still didn’t know if they believed I was looking for work. Took 4 weeks to get a letter saying it was all good.
God, I hate this state.
It was hassle free in Indiana. Had a friend in Massachusetts who had endless headaches when he tried to get it.
My experience here in California was fine, but it did take a few weeks to get started. I was able to do everything online.
My husband had a terrible time. It took months and we spent hours on the phone waiting to speak to someone only to be disconnected. We sent letters. They couldn’t see his last employer for some reason and it was nearly impossible to get this error fixed. My husband would have given up, but we needed the money and so I persisted. But, yeah they suck.
In Michigan, if you are physically unable to work for one day during a week, you cannot collect unemployment benefits for that week. I did not know that and erroneous certified for a week. When they asked later if there were specific days I had been unable to work, I told them I was hurt one Friday and would have been back to work on Monday. This apparently meant to them that I was unable to work on Sunday, and so I was retroactively denied my benefits, and given a huge penalty for intentionally giving false information. Thankfully I was able to put in an appeal and had it settled months later, but the way the computer system was designed I couldn’t actually explain my case to them until the appeals process. I still had to pay back the money I got the week I was hurt on Friday though, despite actively looking for work plenty during the week. I’m guessing it’s not legislative intent to deny benefits in that way, but when part of the law says that you had to be able to work to receive benefits, it was interpreted administratively to mean every single day in order to save themselves money. The fact that it’s relevant that I was unable to work due to an acute injury one particular day while on unemployment looking for work seems awfully strange.
Like most of the social services programs in California, the EDD’s software is twenty years old and attempts at multi-million dollar replacements have failed miserably.
Wow, I’ve read stories similar to yours within the sites that I linked to. Temp jobs are trouble for the unemployed-trying-to-work.
Damn. They penalize you for not working, and then they penalize you for working.
Yep. If everything about your situation is totally normal, things will work fine. If there’s anything unusual at all, hoo boy. Here comes Kafka.
Colorado’s isn’t complicated, but it is sllloooowww. They are totally unapologetic about the length of time between an application and a determination, blithely unconcerned that an individual experiencing unemployment may not have 12 weeks of savings in the bank to support him while they dither.
My brother had a situation similar to tenacious j. One improperly-checked box and it was over.
I had to lay him off from my company, and I filed all the paperwork and he was all approved for unemployment. But he decided to get a long-needed surgery before looking for work right away. He filled out his first unemployment request and honestly said he was not available to work that first week.
He was never able to collect, an was out of work for a year. I was not involved in the fighting of the battle but it didn’t seem pretty. All because he was honest about being laid up. This was in Ohio.
Temp companies don’t want to pay the extra for putting someone on unemployment. They’ll lie to employees saying that temps don’t qualify for it and they’ll like to EDD about you not wanting work. The time a temp service tried to bump me off of unemployment, it only took one phone call to fix. But that was back when you did things at the office instead of online.
The times I’ve been on unemployment in New York it’s been pretty easy. There’s a crappy website and you fill out a form. You have to wait two weeks after you get laid off, though for some reason. Then they give you your benefits via direct deposit. But you have to sign on to the crappy website every week to claim your benefit. If you forget to claim your benefit for that week, you’re boned.
Virginia has similar reporting requirements in terms of injury and reporting requirements. A few years ago when I got dumped off a contract, I signed up for Virginia UI until I could get a full time job. I didn’t have any problems, but I did fudge the reporting in some ways:
Every week you have to apply for a minimum of three jobs. I’m in a good area, so this wasn’t a problem, but it did occur to me that it could be a problem for people who work in some hard-to-employ sectors. If there just aren’t openings at three companies for a physicist every week, for example, do you have to apply to McDonalds? Apparently so. Based on the one-size-fits-all reporting and expectations, you have to apply to any open job in your area, and ACCEPT the first job offered to you. The weekly report did ask if you turned down any jobs that week. I never needed to lie on it but I assume if you said yes (that you turned down a job), you were boned. Shut up and flip that burger, you former NASA Physicist!
The report also had a ridiculous format for reporting each job. Along with the company’s contact information, you had to check a box indicating what happened with your application. Did you get an interview, a call, no response, a job offer, and a few other possible things. It seemed to be set up for the olden days when you applied to jobs in person, got an interview within the hour and had to report to work the next day. On most of mine, I just checked “no response”, because these days with online applications, it can take weeks or longer to get a phone interview. I think it would be pretty hysterical for some business analyst to crunch through their database and generate a report of job application results. “98% no response? WTH?” haha, the media would have a field day!
How about replacing the poorly “trained” EDD reps? According to numerous posts within my links, callers are snapped at, yelled at, interrupted, berated, insulted, and hung up on…on a regular basis.
Virginia, like every state, only requires you to accept suitable employment. The definition varies from state to state, but Virginia’s appears to be broadly similar to the general one.
I’ve heard anecdotes about how many unemployment offices were caught off-guard by the Recession and were simply not set up to handle the typical needs of university-educated white collar workers who suddenly found most of the Senior Policy Analyst, Quality Engineer, and Financial Consultant jobs vanish. The unemployment offices had been structured to AssUMe that most of the people there were manual laborers who couldn’t find a job because they didn’t graduate from high school and/or were illiterate, so their #1 offer was GED preparation and if you can’t get a job then, what’s your problem?
See, I didn’t have any trouble getting UI in Massachusetts, but try explaining to Massachusetts UI why you don’t look for work anymore after signing an employment contract with an employer on a Tuesday morning. That’s like talking to a lamp post. “See, I didn’t look for work the rest of the week, because I had a job that started in less than a week.”