by Anonymous
(Tennesee)
I live in Georgia but I was hired on through a temp agency to work for a company in Tennessee.
The temp agency said that the job would be for 550 hours, when I got those hours the company would then choose to hire me on full time or my time with that company would just be over.
The company asked me to come to work for them full time. After a 2 months I was fired.. Will I be able to draw unemployment or will my earnings made while employed with temp. Agency count?
I have heard from some people that temp agency’s are not required to pay unemployment.
I wasn’t fired while employed through temp agency.
Chris’s Response
Hi Anonymous,
It’s not uncommon for a person to confuse an eligibility issue to receive unemployment with a monetary qualifying issue primarily of concern to a base period employer and whether they will be charged for any of the benefits amount you may be entitled to and dependent on the circumstances of the last (most recent) separation from a job that controls whether you can receive benefits.
So, as far as I can tell, your concern and what you want to know should be to give me enough information so that I might be able to explain to you if the discharge reason and the circumstances leading to you being fired from your most recent job, has the possibility of a legitimate argument as to why the UI department should not side with the employer and find you guilty of work misconduct connected to your work ..
If you want to know if you have a chance at collecting unemployment benefits.
And whoever told you a temp agency doesn’t have to pay unemployment taxes, may actually of had experience with a Georgia re-employment job-training effort someone told me about a couple of years ago.
Basically, in an effort to get people back to work the state purportedly excluded some employment from UI taxes, but I don’t know much more than that about it, but my experience tells me a temp agency is the type of employer that does pay UI taxes and fights benefits the hardest because the nature of temp employment produces a lot of “lack of work unemployment claims” .. meaning many temp agencies are trying to avoid pegging out the UI tax rate because of that when they would have to pay that rate on all their employees wages.
It’s why most temp agencies are also, very creative about how they protest nearly all unemployment claims filed against them.