California Partial unemployment benefits when hours are reduced from 40 to 36?

Are you able to get unemployment if your hours are reduced to 36 from 40. And if you collect and get laid off in the future will that count against you as far as your entitlement month wise

Hi,

Another subject I need to write a main page about .. partial unemployment benefits.

Unless an employer opts (if available in their state) to institute a work share or short time compensation program .. entitlement to partial unemployment benefits is determined on the wages you earn each week and how much less you are earning. Whereas work share or short tiime is based upon the hours you work.

When an employer opts to handle a reduction in hours this way it enables the employee to receive .. basically .. fifty percent of the money they are missing out on due to the reductions.

With regular partial unemployment benefits everything is dependent upon how much you are still earning.

When we establish a claim they determine the amount you would be entitled to if totally unemployed. Although it varies from state to state it is generally fifty percent of what you made per week up to the maximum benefit amount in the specific state. We can also estimate the amount of you are entitled to for that claim or benefit year by taking the WBA times 26, which is the usual duration of benefits. That is the amount of money they will pay you in that benefit year, so when that runs out in 6 months (or 26 weeks) there is nothing available to you for the remaining 6 months of your benefit year.

In your case, you would never get the partial benefits, because the definition of partial benefits is when less than full-time work brings in wages less than your WBA for total unemployment. You are still working 36 hours .. not going to happen.

California is one of the seventeen states that does have a work sharing program, but like I said it is an option for an employer .. not a requirement.

But the real issue your question raises is one of “what will my base period wages look like if six or nine months down the road if things don’t get better and I get laid off.

Basically, if an employer does not provide you with the ability to establish a claim on your full-time wages now the end result will be a smaller weekly benefit amount.

So can you see the possibility for an employer anticipating a lay-off by using this technique to lower their overall liability when they do layoff?

It’s a small rock and a hard place because a reduction of 4 hours a week is probably not a great enough of a reduction in hours or pay to be considered good cause to quit. Some states have established a percentage of wage loss at which good cause begins to exist, other states .. like Indiana have a court decision which said a 33 percent reduction isn’t enough because employer was still providing health benefits.

If I were the claimant in that Indiana case, I’d be thinking to myself, “US Supreme Court, here I come.”

Thanks to all who made it to the bottom of my ramblings:)

Chris