Unemployment Benefits
If you've never had to apply for unemployment insurance, consider yourself lucky.
My wife recently had an issue with her unemployment insurance claim—after an unexpected layoff—that makes me wonder how much progress we’ve made as a country (and species) in the last decade.
For my part, since roughly 2012, I’ve collected unemployment insurance in four states and on two nonconsecutive occasions in one of those states. Consequently, I can call myself an expert on the intricacies and frustrations related to this sorry institution that those of us who don’t have generational wealth or a guaranteed fallback job at the family business have to deal with when the money cord gets cut.
Let me talk about what it is because it’s not as obvious as it sounds: Unemployment insurance is money paid to a worker who is out of work for a reason other than resignation. This money typically comes from taxes paid by employers based on employee earnings, and it’s important to note that the benefit amount is set based on the unemployed applicant’s previous earnings. Now, in a more just or communist society, a person would receive benefits commensurate to his or her needs—but alas, we live under the unjust, golden curtain of capitalism. And we love it.
Nonetheless, the unemployment bureaucrats (of which half are incompetent boobs who could easily be Soviet apparatchiks in disguise) often treat beneficiaries as if they’re mooching off the public trough. This to me is the worst part of unemployment—besides the obvious lack of cash flow—dealing with seat-fillers who do as little as possible, face no consequences for their countless fuckups (when any one of yours could lead to a denial of benefits), and then have the gull to treat you like a freeloader. Everyone knows there’s a general stigma attached to un- or under-employment (even self-employment), and it gets worse when you dare to collect on what you’re entitled to as a taxpaying, law-abiding citizen.
Moreover, anyone living in the modern age who hasn’t dealt with this shit as much as I have would be shocked at how slapdash the system is, how much requirements and rules vary from state to state, and how the technology is always a relic of the 1990s—at best. I’ve learned to take a shot of whiskey and strap in for the (bumpy) ride whenever I submit an unemployment claim.
But the work doesn’t stop at the claim. Most states require weekly reporting on one’s status, which includes reporting any income, which is then subtracted from one’s payment. It should go without saying that failure to submit these weekly reports results in denial of payment. My favorite part is where you have to attest that you are (still) “ready and able to work.” So, in the context of Kafka’s character Gregor (from Metamorphosis) post-metamorphosis, he’s ready to work but not able. Thus, he would be ineligible for unemployment benefits.
But what if one is ready and able, and the required report can’t be filed because the useless system breaks down? A tech lead for the Department of Labor in one state once wrote me an email—after weeks of silence and half-baked attempts at resolution—saying I should accept that “sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.” I told him I’d love to have his cushy-ass job. (I had just lost my job as a technologist at the time, so it felt like serendipity.) But, of course, my appeal fell on deaf ears.
I was also denied payment once because I submitted my weekly report from Spain during a sojourn. For some goddam reason, you have to be in the U.S. in order to be considered “ready and willing to work.” The concepts of remote work, electronic applications, and virtual interviewing is lost on those troglodytes—which is why they still make you enter the fucking street address of the companies you apply for, so that you can submit three “job contacts” a week to a database—to prove you’re not a freeloader. When they get to hell, I hope the devil forces them to provide useless information in exchange for scraps of demon meat.
Speaking of scraps, the hellish reality I just described must be endured for what turns out to be a modest amount of money. The most I ever got was a little north of $400 per week, and the least was closer to $200. Sometimes I wish I could donate it all back to pay for just one state website that doesn’t look like it’s hosted by GeoCities—but they’d probably just waste the money on brand-new fax machines and pagers. The fuckers.
And it’s one thing to fuck with me (multiple times), but now they’re fucking with my wife. The labor department in the southern state we just (luckily) escaped from wanted her to prove U.S. citizenship/residency and go to the painfully unnecessary additional step of having said proof notarized—even though she could not have gotten the job she got laid off from without proving she's legally authorized to be in the U.S. She’s far more patient than I am, so she negotiated a compromise without shouting or threatening violence.
But I’m ready to go break something. Even the words “unemployment insurance” make my blood boil—not to mention the word “notarized.” Do yourself a favor: Don’t lose your job. But if you do, I hope you lose it to me or my wife.