5.3.1 Requirements
5.3.1 Requirements aetrahan Wed, 09/28/2022 - 10:15Regular UC is similar to an insurance policy; the worker has to put in enough to draw out later. A claimant must have worked long enough and earned enough within a certain recent period of time, and the earnings must be spread out in certain ways. The “base period” is the first four calendar quarters of the last five complete calendar quarters before the week of benefit application.1 The wages earned during the base period, subject to a statutory maximum, determine a claimant’s weekly benefit amount (WBA).2 The agency issues a Notice of Monetary Determination to the claimant and base-period employers; the Notice can be reconsidered if in error.
There are two state statutory requirements for base-period wage sufficiency: (1) a minimum earnings requirement;3 and (2) total base period wages of at least one and a half times the amount earned in the highest calendar quarter of the base period.4 This “high-quarter ratio” requirement is a historical leftover from earlier statutory revisions. The result is that some workers need only the statutory minimum in the base period to be eligible (if their wages are spread among quarters), but others can be found ineligible for having insufficient wages, even though they earned several times the minimum, because their wages were concentrated in a single quarter. As a result, many with sporadic employment are shut out completely from UC. Unfortunately for a large sector of the working population, the requirement that wages be spread out in the base period has been held constitutional.5