[Porsche-O-Phile]

The downside of the CA unemployment system is that it's completely antithetical to finding work. It basically works like this:

You take your previous year, and whichever quarter you earned the most becomes the basis of your state payout. In most cases this comes out to be about half of what you made on a month-by-month basis. So if you earned $9k one quarter last year, that comes out to $3k a month, your benefit will be somewhere around $1500 - give or take. There's a cap to this too - at most you'll stand to get $1800 monthly regardless of how well you did in excess of the cutoff.

So far so good, right? Well here's where it gets a bit screwy: If you then go out and get a part-time job or whatever, the amount you earn gets chopped right off what you get through state UI (except for a tiny "exempt" amount - $25 per week I think). So using the previous example of the guy who stands to collect $1500 monthly, if he goes out and tries to do the industrious thing and gets a P/T job (with no benefits, incidentally) for 20-30 hours a week at $10 an hour, he'll make roughly $250 a week (give or take) or $1,000 a month. The state will reward this industriousness by simply lopping $900 off his UI benefit ($25 per week is exempt) meaning he's now gotten a paycheck for $1000 from working and a UI check for $600. But he's also given up his time in order to go work and it's probably taken time away from his family or from looking for another, better job. Where's the incentive for people to work?

This is simply illogical. In order for it to be worth someone's time to go get a part time job and feel the sense of accomplishment that goes along with it rather than simply collecting an unemployment check, the amount they need to earn needs to be SIGNIFICANTLY more than they'd make off of state UI. Otherwise there's really no incentive, since the state just "takes" it anyway. It's a complete disincentive for people to go work part-time jobs.

The ONE potential upside to this is that it discourages highly-trained, highly-educated people from "settling" and taking crap jobs. It encourages them to stay home and (hopefully) to push for and/or look for jobs in their field which hopefully will put them in a position where they'll earn way more than they'd make either on state UI or working some McJob part-time someplace.

The system is whack, but that's how it works.