Are You Eligible for Unemployment Benefits If You Refuse a Job?

You can’t refuse a job offer out of general fear and still receive benefits. If you have a legitimate safety concern—for example, you were offered a job at a nursing home where there isn’t enough protective equipment for staff—you have some protection under a couple of statutes. But there’s still ambiguity in how states interpret the statutes.

That may change soon. President Biden has asked the Labor Department to “consider clarifying” the rules and provide workers “a federally guaranteed right” to refuse a job. Clear guidance from the agency would help states, which administer unemployment benefits, apply the rules fairly and consistently.

The Details

In general, quitting a job or refusing a job offer disqualifies a person from receiving unemployment benefits. If you refuse a job or don’t show up when called back to work, the employer is supposed to report that to the state unemployment agency, which can end your benefits.

But each state’s rules incorporate something called the Labor Standards Provision, says George Wentworth, senior counsel with the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of unemployed workers. That rule allows people to turn down a job where working conditions are substantially worse than those for similar work in the area.

Additional protection can be found in the Stafford Act, which governs federal responses to disasters. It states that a job can be refused if it presents “any unusual risk to the health, safety or morals” of an individual. That law applies to two federal pandemic-related programs, which are set to run out in March.

Application of these statutes to Covid-19 has been inconsistent, Mr. Wentworth says, in part because the statutes didn’t envision a pandemic that has turned almost every workplace into a source of potential exposure to the coronavirus.

“We saw a number of governors who were making kind of sweeping statements along the lines of, ‘If you’re collecting [unemployment insurance] and you get an offer of your old job and you don’t take it, you’ll be disqualified.’ That’s a very rigid reading of what should be a more nuanced case-by-case application of the law,” he says.

Some governors and administrators have expressed concern that people will use the pandemic as an excuse to be paid for not working. Mr. Wentworth says people aren’t inclined to refuse good work these days, and for “the vast majority of workers who collect any benefits, they want nothing more than to go back to the job that they lost.”

While Mr. Biden didn’t explicitly direct the Labor Department to tell states to continue UI benefits for people who refuse a job based on health concerns, he ordered the agency “to consider clarifying that workers have a federally guaranteed right to refuse employment that will jeopardize their health and if they do so, they will still qualify for unemployment insurance,” according to a White House statement.

The next step is for the agency to interpret the relevant statutes and clarify in what circumstances workers can turn down a job and still retain their jobless benefits. A Labor Department spokesman says the agency is currently working on guidance to state workforce systems.

Write to Lauren Weber at [email protected]