by Chris
Good Cause for quitting. Lack of good cause for being fired.
I write this term a lot. It’s included in a lot of searches for unemployment answers.
It seems to me that people are looking for a list of good reasons to get unemployment when they use this term.
Well you will never find a list of definitive reasons because good cause for unemployment must be proven. Every situation has a number of various paths it can follow and even identical situations can have different outcomes depending on the state you live in and or your ability to PROVE.
This is actually at the crux of every consultation I do. Proving good cause or showing the lack of it requires a strategy of knowing what documents, testimony and or information to provide to a state.
The biggest problem for employees when it comes to getting unemployment usually began while they were still employed.
Every single unemployment claim is examined for it’s own uniqueness and whether it contains the elements needed to allow or deny benefits.
The first step to understanding how to proceed is to identify the issue at hand.
There are plenty of Q&A’s which focus on the process of developing a strategy for proving good cause.
And don’t forget .. good cause will in most cases will be subject to an objective standard of “the reasonable person.
The unfortunate part of law in general for us non-attorney types and this includes unemployment law is that what is used to base decisions on is found in precedent law. Most states do not provide information to us which helps us to interpret our own circumstances according to precedents.
Access to your state’s unemployment precedents can be expensive and even if you opt to research at an affordable law research database, such as Loislaw, you may spend the bulk of your time trying to find the applicable decisions.
The majority of what I know about unemployment was gained by reading decision after decision after unemployment decision.
I know now that unemployed people lose because they fail to take the process seriously enough. They don’t quite understand that filing a simple claim for unemployment benefits is entering into a “Legal Realm” and the system manipulates us into a complacent attitude of trust.
If you need to get unemployment .. you need to be aggressive and be on the offensive from the start of the process, which in my mind is from the first day on the job.
Your employer thinks this way .. and so should you.