I'll be on travel for a few days, but I'll be collecting new information to post next Tuesday.

I've tried to work out a way to post to the site while I'm gone, but so far have had no luck wrestling with Radio Userland. Hopefully I'll have a solution that my firewall won't prohibit before my next trip.

5:02:46 PM    
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An Associated Press article was carried in by CBS News and numerous others on 7 July 2003: "The state's highest court ruled that a woman who used a laptop and a phone line to work in Florida for a Long Island company was not eligible for New York unemployment aid."

A related article by Carrie Mason-Draffen for NewsDay.com explains that Florida had originally found her eligible for unemployment benefits, but Reuters, her former employer, contested on the basis that she had not been fired, but rather had quit rather than accept a transfer to New York. This article gave some additional information:

"Generally, the "uniform rule" of unemployment insurance law says that unemployment benefits are paid by the state where the individual physically works, the justices said. But lower-court rulings that preceded yesterday's decision underscored how unsettled the law is on the issue of telecommuters, and the justices also acknowledged how new the issue of telecommuting is to legal scrutiny.

"No other state or federal court seems yet to have interpreted the uniform rule as applied to interstate telecommuters," the justices wrote."

Is there really anything new here? Living in Northern Virginia as I do, I've always worked with a mixture of staff who resided in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. At one point I was living in Herndon, Virginia while working on-site with a customer in Bethesda, Maryland for a company based in Islandia, New York which had a local office in Reston, Virginia. Applying the "uniform rule" as described above, if I'd been fired, then Maryland would have been responsible. That doesn't seem right, somehow, and I wasn't even teleworking back then.

Labor laws are confusing, but I don't think we can blame this one on telecommuting.

3:39:47 PM    
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