It’s odd to see eligibility criteria for unemployment insurance being called out here as if it were a recent development, or tied to Republicans. I work with unemployment claims in a “blue” state, and it’s my understanding that, while laws pertaining to unemployment insurance after being discharged do vary from state to state, laws nationwide usually call for a denial of benefits if the claimant was discharged for “misconduct.”
In my state, misconduct is defined as a “willful or wantonly negligent disregard of the standards of behavior that an employer has a right to expect of an employee” or a “willful or wantonly negligent disregard of an employer’s interest.”
This is written into statute, and hasn’t changed, at least in the past 5 years that I’ve been doing this, nor was it recently enacted by a Republican-led legislature. Like I say, it’s fairly standard from state to state.
[See, for example, the Dept. of Labor’s “Benefits, Timliness, Quality” manual (pdf) (which is all about how administrative decisions allowing or denying UI benefits are scored for quality), page VI - 4, the guidesheet for discharge decisions. As it says right at the top, “Discharge from a job for misconduct connected with the work is cause for disqualification.” ]
You might want to have a debate about why people are being denied unemployment insurance after being discharged for misconduct, but this is nothing new.
