Can You Quit A Job
And Collect Unemployment?

You can .. if you can prove the employer gave you good cause to quit, or you quit for a personal reason provided for in a provision of the unemployment laws of your state .. like moving to follow a spouse, but you still better be able to prove you exhausted all reasonable efforts to preserve the employment.

Listen up, I nor anyone, can say definitively you will collect.  But from experience and based upon on a multitude of questions I can venture a guess that unemployment benefits were not in the cards.

Not because so few provided me with the details that would allow me to venture a guess, but because so few ever answered my question about what evidence they might have to prove  their exhaustive efforts to preserve the employment to the point any similar reasonable person would also.

That evidence shows the employees efforts and how the quitting was made attributable to the work, or employer through exhaustive efforts to correct something wrong at work.

This is the burden you must prove at an unemployment hearing.

The reasonable person who gets to decide most voluntary quits as being without good cause is called a "claims adjudicator" and that point most unemployed people give up and never file an unemployment appeal.

However, when an employee does manage to get benefits at the initial determination level they can expect their former employer to appeal.   Why? because employers know the question, Can you quit and collect unemployment benefits is determined by your actions as an employee to save your job and if the simple protest of "claimant quit for reasons unknown to the employer" don't work, their testimony at an unemployment hearing that you never approached them to resolve some sort of conflict with the work will do you in.

Creating good cause occurs whie you have a job .. even one you hate or love .. because you're the one that must prove voluntarily quitting was attributable to the employment or of such a necessitous and compelling personal reason as to justify the payment of benefits coming out of a "general unemployment tax fund" instead of your employers state UI tax account.

As an unemployment hearing consultant, I assigned voluntary quits appeals to hearing reps in training because the hearings were  like taking candy from a baby.  

If there was one thing I counted on for the sake of an employer,  it was that the employee claimant had no proof that showed any  reasonable efforts to continue in the job.  All they had was the story.

Can you quit your job and collect unemployment, may be  a simple question, but the answer is to fulfill the burden of proof as an employee and of course the reasons we quit are as individual as we are and open to interpretation as to how reasonable you acted as an employee.

And remember, evidence is documented.

Can you quit your job  - Q&A's                                                      Back to Quit Your Job                                                                  Job Coach Before You Quit?                                        Unemployment Hearing Representation                                         

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