I don’t understand how I don’t qualify for the California Emergency Unemployment Compensation extension. I was a full time employee for almost 14 years. I was fired before I was to return because they had filled my position.
I qualified for unemployment was denied any sort of extension because I didn’t earn any money while I was stuck in bed.
The only reason I don’t have earnings in excess of 40 times my weekly benefit amount or 1.5 times the highest quarter in the base period of my regular claim is because I became pregnant in February 2010 & developed serious complications & was under strict doctors orders to be on bed rest/maternity leave May 2010-April 2011. I would have continued to work full time if I had been able to.
There must be some sort of law that protects women who were on maternity leave & disabled because of a high risk pregnancy/after pregnancy complications & therefor unable to work & earn their regular income.
I should not be faulted for having a complicated pregnancy & being unable to work. I worked so hard for a very long time & paid my dues. Can’t they look at my past base periods?
Hi,
I’m just going to work my way forward through your problem as best I can so this might benefit others.
I’ll get to your question at some point.
And I going to move forward assuming what your BYB is.
California has two different base periods they can look at for a claim for regular unemployment benefits and they are both relative to the date (really the specific quarter) the claim is filed.
Regular unemployment benefits are separate from disability unemployment .. which you either pay for with a special withholding tax (I believe it is optional) Anyone can find which states offer a temporary disability insurance. The list is short, but you’re lucky because California is on it.
Effective sometime in early April of 2011, California also began offering the use of an alternative base period (Table3-2) in addition to the standard base period for use in qualifying people monetarily for regular benefits. It wouldn’t have done you any good.
California does not have what is known as an extended base period which would allow them to establish a base period of wages prior to your disability. This is what might have done you a world of good.
Adding base periods available to qualify someone was one of the options for modernizing UI laws that was available to all states if they wanted to receive a portion of the stimulus in 2009. California only chose to add an alternative BP which looks at the preceding 4 quarters to the filing quarter.
The monetary qualifying formulas are located in Table 3-3 of the same resource above.
So, although I can feel for you, I know that because you are in California, you’ve had the best accessibility to benefits while you were on bed rest and not able to work and that there are women under very similar conditions in other states that haven’t received any kind of assistance and had no hope from the very beginning of their ordeal and may still be in the same boat as you are now, benefitless.
It is a known fact, that the laws which control UI are not fair to many women in this country.
Take for example a young mother that has chosen to work only part-time out of need to save the cost of childcare and loses that job through no fault of her own. To qualify for her right to those benefits, many states will not allow her to limit her availability to search for only part-time work.
But here’s what I tried to figure out for you and based upon the dates you gave me.
You became available to work in April of 2011, so I assume that is when you filed your claim.
If a base period were to qualify you, it would have had to of been the standard which is the first four of the last five COMPLETED quarters .. relative to the quarter you filed in.
Your BP equals .. at least I think it does, Jan of 2010 to Dec of 2010.
Nearly all states require a person to have wages in at least two quarters in a base period. The high earning quarter and a portion of that amount somewhere else outside of that quarter, but still in the base. California’s requirement is 1.25
Again, you live in California which if you’d look at that formula it says:
$1,300 in HQ or alternative: $900 in HQ with BPW = 1¼ x HQ
Where other states may require the more typical 1.5
To qualify for an extension the rule is basically this: Source is again DOLETA’s chartbooks.
“A worker must have 20 weeks of covered work or the equivalent in covered wages (which exceed
1½ times high-quarter wages or 40 times the weekly benefit amount) in the base period.
Is it unfair? Probably. But it is not exclusive to women that become pregnant and have to go on bed rest.
It’s part of the design to limit access to benefits which employers cannot be charged for.