The U.S. Department of Labor reported that 219,000 Americans filed for unemployment insurance benefits in the week ending April 4, a substantial increase from the week before. The vast majority of those who applied for benefits will receive them, including those who lost their jobs due to mass layoffs. Some won’t.
Section 100 of the California Unemployment Insurance Code says the purpose of the unemployment insurance system is to provide “benefits for persons unemployed through no fault of their own.” Among other things, that means those terminated for insubordination are ineligible for benefits. But insubordination is not mere disobedience.
In 1984, the California Supreme Court ruled that disqualifying misconduct is limited to an employee’s “willful and wanton misbehavior,” meaning deliberate violations of the employer’s standards of behavior, or gross or recurrent negligence reflecting “equal culpability, wrongful intent or evil design, or … an intentional and substantial disregard of the employer’s interests or of the employee’s duties and obligations to his employer.”
By contrast, an employee’s “mere inefficiency, unsatisfactory conduct, failure in good performance as the result of inability or incapacity, inadvertencies or ordinary negligence in isolated instances, or good faith errors in judgment or discretion” is not disqualifying.
It is the employer’s burden to rebut the presumption that the termination was for reasons other than...
By Victor Ahiuma-Young The National Pension Commission (PenCom) has introduced stricter advertising rules for Pension Fund Administrators, PFAs, warning operators against false claims, misleading ...