Unemployment Compensation

Unem­ploy­ment Compensation

By Jus­tice Paul e. Pfeifer

When Mary Williams was offered a pro­mo­tion at her job with Bridge­way, Inc., she had no idea that it would lead to a legal chal­lenge that would bring her here – to the Supreme Court of Ohio. Bridge­way is a com­mu­nity men­tal health cen­ter that pro­vides a vari­ety of ser­vices, includ­ing hous­ing ser­vices, employ­ment ser­vices, and coun­sel­ing to the men­tally ill.

About three months after Mary was hired as a full-time res­i­den­tial social worker, she was offered a pro­mo­tion to res­i­den­tial ser­vices pro­gram man­ager. In that posi­tion she would super­vise and man­age two 24-hour res­i­den­tial facil­i­ties and be respon­si­ble for all aspects of the oper­a­tion, includ­ing sign­ing off on clin­i­cal treat­ment plans.

The pro­mo­tion was con­di­tioned on the require­ment that Mary obtain cer­ti­fi­ca­tion as a licensed inde­pen­dent social worker (“LISW”) within 15 months. Her appoint­ment let­ter made it clear what was required: “Fail­ure to com­plete the LISW licen­sure by May of 2008 will make you inel­i­gi­ble to keep this posi­tion.” Mary signed the let­ter, acknowl­edg­ing that she accepted “the terms and con­di­tions of employment.”

Mary was sched­uled to take the LISW exam in April 2008, but because of health con­cerns, she resched­uled the test for June – with Bridgeway’s con­sent. Unfor­tu­nately, she didn’t receive a pass­ing score in June and wasn’t eli­gi­ble to take the exam again for 90 days. Because she hadn’t got­ten her cer­ti­fi­ca­tion within the time required, Mary was terminated.

When Mary filed for unem­ploy­ment com­pen­sa­tion, her appli­ca­tion was denied because it was deter­mined that she had been dis­charged with just cause. At a review hear­ing, Mary’s super­vi­sor acknowl­edged that another pro­gram man­ager, who had worked at Bridge­way for 13 years, didn’t have LISW cer­ti­fi­ca­tion – but she was a reg­is­tered nurse and a licensed counselor.

Addi­tion­ally, when the super­vi­sor started with Bridge­way as a pro­gram man­ager in 2000, she didn’t have cer­ti­fi­ca­tion either. But fol­low­ing her pro­mo­tion to super­vi­sor in 2006, she obtained the license.

In respond­ing to the issue of the man­agers who weren’t cer­ti­fied, the hear­ing offi­cer stated, “It is not uncom­mon to have employ­ers increase the edu­ca­tion pre-requisites in order to be hired or main­tain employ­ment.” The hear­ing offi­cer thus affirmed the pre­vi­ous deci­sion that Mary had been dis­charged with just cause.

Mary took her case to the Court of Com­mon Pleas of Cuya­hoga County, which affirmed the Unem­ploy­ment Com­pen­sa­tion Review Commission’s deci­sion. But the court of appeals – where she went next – reversed the lower court, con­clud­ing that Mary’s require­ment to obtain an LISW cer­ti­fi­ca­tion wasn’t fairly applied to other pro­gram man­agers. After that, her case came before us for final review.

Ohio’s unem­ploy­ment law says that no per­son will be paid ben­e­fits if “the indi­vid­ual quit work with­out just cause or has been dis­charged for just cause in con­nec­tion with the individual’s work…”

Although the statute doesn’t define the term, our court has stated that “just cause” is “that which, to an ordi­nar­ily intel­li­gent per­son, is a jus­ti­fi­able rea­son for doing or not doing a par­tic­u­lar act.” “Just cause” depends on the fac­tual cir­cum­stances of each case.

In 1991, our court said that the pur­pose of the Unem­ploy­ment Com­pen­sa­tion Act is “to enable unfor­tu­nate employ­ees, who become and remain invol­un­tar­ily unem­ployed by adverse busi­ness and indus­trial con­di­tions, to sub­sist on a rea­son­ably decent level and is in keep­ing with human­i­tar­ian and enlight­ened con­cepts of this mod­ern age.”

We cau­tioned, how­ever, that the Act doesn’t “exist to pro­tect employ­ees from them­selves, but to pro­tect them from eco­nomic forces over which they have no con­trol. When an employee is at fault, he is no longer the vic­tim of fortune’s whims, but is instead directly respon­si­ble for his own predica­ment. Fault on the employee’s part sep­a­rates him from the Act’s intent and the Act’s pro­tec­tion. Thus, fault is essen­tial to the unique chem­istry of a just cause termination.”

In this case, it’s clear that Mary knew she had to get cer­ti­fi­ca­tion within 15 months or face ter­mi­na­tion. There’s no evi­dence that obtain­ing the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion within that time­frame was an unrea­son­able expectation.

Find­ing that Mary’s dis­charge was with just cause is con­sis­tent with the pur­pose of the Unem­ploy­ment Com­pen­sa­tion Act, which “was intended to pro­vide finan­cial assis­tance to an indi­vid­ual who had worked, was able and will­ing to work, but was tem­porar­ily with­out employ­ment through no fault” of her own.

There were no out­side eco­nomic fac­tors influ­enc­ing Mary’s ter­mi­na­tion. She had a respon­si­bil­ity to obtain the license. Fail­ing to meet that require­ment was suf­fi­cient to estab­lish fault.

The court of appeals – in con­clud­ing that Mary’s ter­mi­na­tion was with­out just cause because the require­ment to obtain cer­ti­fi­ca­tion wasn’t fairly applied to all the pro­gram man­agers – relied on a fair­ness stan­dard that had been estab­lished by that court in 1986. But our court never adopted that stan­dard, and we didn’t find it nec­es­sary to do so now.

Mary accepted the pro­mo­tion know­ing that she was required to obtain cer­ti­fi­ca­tion within 15 months. The require­ment was stated as an express con­di­tion of the pro­mo­tion; it wasn’t a com­pany pol­icy. Plus, she wasn’t in the same sit­u­a­tion as the other pro­gram managers.

Mary made a bona fide effort to get cer­ti­fied, but she failed to meet the require­ment and was ter­mi­nated with just cause. As we have stated in the past, “To find that an employee is enti­tled to unem­ploy­ment com­pen­sa­tion when she is ter­mi­nated for her inabil­ity to per­form the job for which she was hired would dis­cour­age employ­ers from tak­ing a chance on an unproven worker.

“Most employ­ees need an employer to take a leap of faith when ini­tially hir­ing them. An employer relies upon an employee’s rep­re­sen­ta­tions that she can ade­quately per­form the required work. Like­wise, an employee relies upon an employer’s descrip­tion of what the job will entail. The party that fails to live up to those expec­ta­tions is at fault.”

By a seven-to-zero vote we reversed the judg­ment of the court of appeals and con­cluded that the Unem­ploy­ment Com­pen­sa­tion Review Commission’s deci­sion to deny Mary’s unem­ploy­ment was not unlaw­ful, unrea­son­able, or against the man­i­fest weight of the evidence.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The case referred to is: Williams v. Ohio Dept. of Job & Fam­ily Servs., 129 Ohio St.3d 332, 2011-Ohio-2897. Case No. 2010–1166. Decided June, 22, 2011. Major­ity opin­ion writ­ten by Jus­tice Judith Ann Lanzinger.

Posted by Paul Pfeifer on Feb 8 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.