Does Your State’s Unemployment Department Do Their Job Well?

Absolute worst experience every year ..complacent lazy employees..dont hit a wrong button.phone represenitives 3 days 8 hours a day..no answer..had to go to our 1 office in south jersey, as compared to the many job locating offices…waste of taxpayers money..same jobs listed on internet..if u r even looking for one..whole day in office to use there phone…going back tomorrow..pay babysitter 2 days…horrible experience.
Need to privatize..get rid of bullshit one stop career centers

From what I’ve seen in Colorado and California, their jobs seem to entail keeping money out of the hands of the unemployed and only paying lip service to the notion of finding a job. In that regard, they perform admirably. Every job I’ve ever had, whether already employed or out of work and seeking employment, I’ve found on my own and never with even token help from the unemployment office. Their job postings, whether in paper or on the internet, have never panned out. (Unless, of course, you want to take minimum wage dishwashers’ positions. Then their selection is outstanding.)

In California, I was fired for a discrepancy on the time sheet. I left early one day but put my usual time out on the sign-out line. I fixed it the next day with the manager’s awareness and approval. The district manager fired me for it, although the mistake was fixed well before payroll got the time sheet. California says I was not qualified for unemployment because I was trying to commit fraud.

Colorado, California’s evil twin brother, is as bad. I was fired from a temp position when I couldn’t report to work one day. I called them from the ER six hours prior to the start of the shift and said I couldn’t make it in. Colorado says illness is a valid reason to be fired, since I was disqualified then. Most recently, I was fired from a job because my schedule was changed and I wasn’t notified. I didn’t arrive on time and was flagged as a no-call, no-show. This time, however, I managed to win my UI on appeal, a thoroughly unnecessary effort since the evidence shown on the initial claim and at the appeal was the same.

But like I said, if the unemployment office’s job is to keep money in the state’s coffers and leave the unemployed hanging, they’re batting a thousand.

i do understand that there are so many people out of work, but they have a job and they have regular pay coming in, it is like they dont really care. If you call they are so very rude. It just seems they really dont care, they are paying their bills and we are just a number to them, but on the other hand I know they cant really care about everyone as many people as there are out of work.

I have learned that in Florida you can not trust the unemployment office to do its job. They never investigated my initial claim. I never got a phone call and had to go through the torment of appeals and when my representative asked for the records the investigators paperwork indicated that my employer had been called and that I had been called and that I said stuff I never said. Also my name was spelled wrong on the paperwork. In my opinion that investigator should have been fired for lying and not doing their job but guess what you can’t track them down or say anything. Their most recent snafu was to change the name of the department and in the process change the website so that people could not do ANYTHING over the internet for approximatley 4 days. This wouldn’t have been a problem in the past because we could have used the telephone to claim weeks etc. But the governor decided to do away with it making the internet the only way to do do anything. So people who depend on a check to live by a certain day of the week had to wait while the unemployment office got its act together. If you have a problem and need to talk to someone in person, good luck, there is no office to go to and getting someone on the telephone is an all day affair. When you do manage to get someone on the phone its a 60/40 chance that the person doesn’t know what they are talking about necessitating another phone call just so you can verify information. In march of 2011 another persons name and earnings were attached to my file, apparently by mistake. How do I know this? I made the huge mistake of accepting a temporary job (not understanding the system) in the hopes that it would turn into something permanent and got fired after 3 days. This turned into a 2.5 month ordeal with the unemployment office as I was sent into review. I was asked about my earnings of march 2011 of which I had none and was told that there was an attachment on my file since march. It is now may. I tell them to take it off by July the issue was still not resolved. I had to call the attorney generals office to get it straightened out and even then it took another two weeks. So it was not untill the middle of July (from the beginning of May) that everything got straightened out AND if I had not been vigilant and kept calling and monitoring my status I would still be waiting to collect if at all! One time when I called the lady on the phone told me to be patient as the process takes time. If I had taken her advice I would still be waiting because she didn’t know what she was talking about. The next lady told me that my paperwork was screwed up and she took the appropriate measures to fix problems. I hate the fact that the state of Florida uses up money to build a fancy new unemployment website. I don’t need a new website, I need more people on the phones who are educated in the unemployment system. I need an office that I can go to and ask questions to someone in person.