by Anonymous
(Pennsylvania)
My husband works for United States Postal Service and is being transferred to Ohio. Am I eligible for trailing spouse unemployment benefits?
The answer to your question, whether it’s possible to collect unemployment benefits when voluntarily quitting to trail, or follow a spouse from any state, is a simple matter of knowing if there is a provision creating an exception to good cause being attributable to your own employer .. in the non-monetary issue chartbook, found here.
As you will note, at the link above, PA unemployment law is set up differently to always include the possibility of their being good cause for personal reasons, as long as the claimant can prove before they quit, they exhausted all reasonable efforts to first preserve their employment relationship and the conditions and reason for quitting are of a necessitous and compelling nature to the extent another “reasonable person” under similar circumstances would also need to quit.
Discussions regarding PA allowing, or denying benefits, about a voluntary quit to trail a spouse being with good cause, show that Pennsylvania really does expect a claimant to be able to prove they exhausted all efforts by using the reasonable person standard and this can cause a denial being caused by even the reasons for the spouse leaving the locale for a transfer, as well as the trailing claimant, not using any available employer transfer request policy.
In others words.. when a claimant exhaust efforts to preserve their job, it may still be about shifting blame to look like it was attributable to the employer.
Of course this can give the state some justification for why an employer’s request for relief of charges might also be denied.
Don’t let me freak you out Anonymous in PA.. because I’m merely trying to explain the reasons I know, I preach covering all the bases you can .. before you leave employment as unemployment often feels like falling down a rabbit hole. Even for many who did have good cause, but no proof of good cause, if they read a provision in law, and then think it’s suggesting it’s always a win/win scenario.
To find prior discussions about meeting this burden of proof to show you exhausted efforts to preserve, you might try searching for the Q&As here, or those found here.
I answered over a thousand before I began splitting Q&As into actual categories related to the most common non-monetary separation issues .. or what I’m doing now separating Q&As by state.