The state of Ohio has set up a website for employers. As businesses begin to reopen, they want to know who has not returned to work, if they quit (resigned), or if they are milking the unemployment system and just hanging out at home.
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They got these rules, you see.
“Ohio law prohibits individuals from receiving unemployment benefits if they refuse to accept offers of suitable work, or quit work, without good cause,” the department said in a email obtained by Cleveland.com, which was circulated to companies on May 1.
“If you have employees who refuse to return to work or quit work, it’s important that you let the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS) know so we can make accurate eligibility determinations,” it said in the email.
The Federal incentives for those unemployed by government shutdowns, added to state unemployment benefits, have created a problem. For some folks, it pays more not to work. This incentive could keep many people home. Ohio, seeing this disturbed in the force, is relying on existing laws to close the spigot.
If you were working and can work, but won’t, no unemployment benefits for you.
The state is also using the same resource to determine how well employers have tried to protect jobs because that weighs on the matter of whether the employee is eligible for compensation as unemployed.
“We’ve always had an administrative review process,” the director told reporters. “It basically hinges on whether there’s a good-cause reason for that refusal to return to work.”
Not every employer may want every employee back, even if their job is still available. And not every employee will want to work where they worked for any number of reasons. But that does not mean taxpayers should support them. Ohio is trying to work through a way to answer the question.
It’s a bureaucracy, so no one should have high hopes for either consistency or competency. But any effort to protect taxpayers from unnecessary spending is worth noting even when the expenditure is almost entirely a feature of political force used to take jobs away from people, as is the case with the virus scare.
And it is not a problem limited to Ohio.
