Unemployment Insurance: Sometimes the Little Guy Wins

     I've written in the past about my travails with the NYS Unemployment Insurance people. This year again, they screwed me. Back in May, I managed to lose my job as a security guard at a gated community over in Jericho, NY.

    No doubt it was my fault, I made an error in letting in a truck-without getting their info. I had assumed that they were an oil truck or garbage truck or something-we would always let them in without identification or questions.

    It just so turned out that the truck I let in was a repo guy and took this guy's car. What happened, I believe, was that the tow truck was sent by the guy's wife's attorney-they were having an acrimonious divorce. He himself, supposedly is a very prominent lawyer-he represented John Gotti, I am told.

    When I got home this fellow who I had seen a total of once in 5 months called and gave me the third degree. He seemed to suspect that I knew who it was-that maybe I was in on a hit or something. He then unsummarily fired me and even demanded that I bring back the cheap uniform-just a shirt with black pants they had given me.

    He seemed to think I should feel very bad for the fellow. I did. I really wish I hadn't gotten John Gotti's lawyer's car towed. But it was an accident. He asked me how I would feel. I replied that I got my car towed in the Summer of 2011.

    Did anyone's head roll for me? Did anyone get fired because of my misfortune? Of course not. And unlike Gotti's lawyer, I had no money and no insurance I could fall back on to get me another car. I do feel bad, but can we have some perspective?

    So, I was SOL. Just my luck, at this point, the industry-I had just joined late in 2011, getting my license, suddenly dried up. I would spend the Summer without work. Worse, the guy who fired me fought my unemployment claim. After receiving it for a few weeks I got a call from this guy at the UI office.

   He came at me like he's Joe McCarthy and I'm Alger Hiss or something. He seems very impressed that the company had me sign something that said I wouldn't let in anyone without identification. This the UI guy seemed convinced, meant that I had "broken a company policy."

   Now, the way it works is that this is a very specific legal status. You can receive UI benefits if you get fired, but what you were fired for matters. If you do something that they decide constitutes breaking a company policy, the company doesn't have to pay you.

    The UI guy seemed to have made up his mind. I tried to explain my side of it-that it seemed to me I didn't so much break a company policy as simply make a human error-I made a mistake, possibly a stupid one. But I had not willfully broken a company policy and after all, they had never warned me of being fired before. And, for the record, I'd always been on time, always done my job without any complaints or trouble

   I had a good relationship with many of the residents. Of course, this UI guy didn't care. For him it was black and white, cut and dried. My signature was on this form. Ergo, they had me and that was that.

   He told me I'd receive a decision within a week or so, but the tone of the conversation didn't augur well.

   I got a note the next week, telling me, yes, they decided a broke a company policy. They even demanded I pay back what I had received until then.

   So I'm out of work, I need this money to really even be able to keep up my search properly-looking for work requires transportation and an ability to pay your phone bill.

   And now they have a gun to my head for my to pay them.

    So I appealed. A few weeks ago I got my day in "court" so to speak, or at least in arbitration. The guy who canned me was there with an assistant  who read word for word from their form with my signature on.

    However, they were not ready for my line of attack at all. See, my theory, was that while they saw it as black and white. I singed a form. They argued I didn't do what I signed. Case closed.

    For me, though, it wasn't case closed. The question of breaking a company policy I saw as interpretive. I read how years ago, a guy had ripped off the cab company he worked for by keeping more money one night than he should have in tips.

    UI decided he should still keep his benefits. That was a long time ago-1940. On the other hand, it seems that in recent years more companies are fighting UI claims-the reason is because when they pay out claims their insurance goes up the next year.

    Recently you've seen companies try to deny claims to someone because a worker failed to greet someone working at a pizza shop or something. See, the beauty of it is that any reason you get fired, is in some sense against company policy.

    My strategy was to point this out and to create some doubt as to whether what I did was simply make an error in performing by job-what happened to simple incompetence?

    My job called for me to let the right people in and keep the wrong people out. On this day I failed to perform my duties, though it was not deliberate.

    So after he testified, the judge told me I could ask him some questions. Right away I ask him how many UI claims he gets in a year. His assistant, jumps right in an objects. The judge sustained the objection but she said it remained on the record.

    However, what I was driving at was how many UI claims do they pay? By the end of my testimony, they did not seem happy. The judge was definitely sympathetic to me. She was nodding and kind of smiling.

    So the assistant jumped in. She wanted to get a final comment in. She said that what they do there is so important that mistakes aren't allowed. She almost literally said "We can't allow being human here. There is too much on the line. Someone could have been killed by letting that man in." And so on.

    Then the judge let me answer. I pointed out that working for a security company doesn't magically turn us into cyborgs, we're still human, and while you try to avoid them, mistakes unfortunately do happen.
  
     Then I said, "This is why I asked at the beginning about how many claims they get. I wanted to find the line between incompetence and breaking a company policy."

     The judge was openly nodding and saying yes, silently. My old employers left the place not looking very happy. The next week I got notified in the mail that I indeed won.

     Yes, this is very sweet. These folks don't even consider the human side of this. It wasn't enough to fire me. Yes, I'd made a mistake but I had no pattern. Of course it's their choice to fire me.

     But that wasn't enough. They then had to try to stop me from getting my benefits. How much more did this guy need to kick me in the teeth to feel validated? 

     So on that day, the little guy fought back. It shows that it's certainly always worth appealing these tings. And that sometimes the little guy can win.

     Seeing the look on his face was priceless. And things seem to be getting better for me all at once. Everything seems to come in bunches-rain but also sun.

     I now got a new gig at Slomin's oil setting appointments I started last week. It's going pretty good so far. I set up 4 already. So maybe things are looking up for me and for our country.

     The main thing we need is to re-elect President Obama and it looks like it's going to happen. So much so that now the GOP is claiming the pollsters are out to get them.

      http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-morning-plum-no-pollsters-are-not-conspiring-to-destroy-romney/2012/09/25/cf6c2af4-06fb-11e2-a10c-fa5a255a9258_blog.html

      Talk about kill the messenger!

      On that day, I like to think I beat not just that idiot former boss of mine but the spirit of Mitt Romney, the spirit of the GOP.