Fired while on TTD - ramifications?

[angel440]

What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? CA

Hi all; thanks for the great forum.

Injured Aug 2010. TTD'd end of Oct 2010. Still TTD now, getting EDD through Apr 2011. I don't know if I will be physically able to do my job anymore. I was terminated; I found out from my private insurance when trying to pay for some prescriptions (unrelated to my comp claim).

I mainly have two questions. #1 I don't want to have to tell future employers I was fired. If I give them the backstory, they will know I filed a comp claim and pose risks. I was a great employee; they never would have fired me had I not been hurt. Do ER's ever change firings to resignations after the fact? #2 If I am RTW (unlikely) in April, can I collect unemployment? I won't have a job.

Thank you. :S

 

[cbg]

You can ask your employer to change the firing to a resignation after the fact but he has no legal obligation to do so. There is no shame in having been let go for medical reasons. Lying about the reason you were let go has a tendency to come back and bite you in the behind.

When you are medically cleared to return to work you will be able to collect unemployment IF you have sufficient wages in the look back period.

 

[commentator]

File for your unemployment benefits NOW. This will preserve the money in the claim. The longer it is from the time you last worked till you file, the more quarters of work you will lose, as they do not go back to the beginning of your work history, it rolls forward as the quarters change.

So file the claim right now. Do not wait till April. This will set it up based on the past 18 months of wages, and you shouldn't have as many blank quarters right now as you'd have in April or later. The claim you file right now will be good for one year from the date you file it, even if you don't start drawing the money from it immediately. If you wait, there may not be a claim to file.

Then the unemployment system people will go into the reason you were terminated, which means they will contact your employer to verify that you are terminated. I find it hard to believe the company has not notified you of your termination in some way. At least with this, you will get it confirmed if they have, in fact, terminated you.

You will of course have your medical information, and that the company terminated you for being out on sick leave will mean there was no misconduct involved in the termination, and that means you are going to be approved. You cannot draw unemployment and worker's comp at the same time. You must be able and available, released by your doctor to at least light duty work before you can get unemployment. But you need to have the claim set up and ready even if you are a while away from this point. So file it now.

If you were dumb enough to try get the company to say you "resigned" then you would NOT get unemployment after being terminated, as leaving the company would have been your decision, not theirs. I do not understand why in the world you think this would be more desirable on your work history, even if it were true.

Don't get so worried about whether your employer elects to say they terminated you or fired you or you voluntarily resigned. It certainly doesn't sound better to future employers to try to say you "resigned" under these circumstances, it just sounds like a big whopping lie, which it is.

Employers are not stupid. If you have a job, and then a great glaring hole in your work history, they're going to assume that something has happened. It doesn't hurt for them to realize you were drawing unemployment during this time. Even if you were terminated by the employer instead of being laid off, that you were drawing benefits means the employer did not have a valid misconduct reason to let you go.

The future employer is allowed to ask you "is there any reason you cannot perform this job?" That is all you need to volunteer about your past injury while job searching in the future.
If you come out of this injury/incident with so many restrictions that you have to inform future employers about them, then perhaps you may need to look into changing careers, getting some retraining, or filing for disability.

 

[angel440]

Thank you very much cbg and commentator. I literally found out about being fired moments before posting. It was quite jarring emotionally and also a blow to my ego (or so I thought) about thinking of myself as someone who had been fired from their job.

Thank you so much for your lucid, even-keeled advice. Asking for a resignation is completely ridiculous. And I especially appreciated commentator's point about future employers ability to infer the collection of SDI/UI benefits during gaps in employment.

There's a lot of career "guidance" out there saying stuff like, "If you have a single typo on your resume you will NEVER find another job EVER..." I unreasonably translated this into thinking that being fired means you not hirable. Thank you both for your help. I'm filling out the UI online application now, with the understanding that it will not be accepted until I'm RTW.

Relieved,

-Angela