Court Opinion

ID: 9860743
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 23:31:22.842864+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:26:35.598593
License: Public Domain

LeGRAND, Justice
(dissenting).
This is the kind of case which gives a good social program a bad name. The Iowa Employment Security Law (chapter 96, The Code) has for its purpose the payment of prescribed benefits to those who suffer the hardship and privation imposed by involuntary unemployment. In the present case the majority instead confers those benefits upon one who was unemployed by choice, not by necessity.
In order to establish the right to unemployment compensation, a claimant must be one who “is able to work, is available for work, and is earnestly and actively seeking work.” § 96.4(3), The Code. The Iowa Department of Job Service has adopted rules implementing this statute. One of these requires a claimant to act “as a normal, prudent person who is out of work and seeking work.” 370 I.A.C. § 4.22(l)(c)(l).
In the present case claimant was employed by New Homestead, a nursing home. She left that job voluntarily for a better paying position with the United States Postal Service. After working there approximately six months she was laid off under what she describes as the government policy “to let you work six months and to lay you off to collect unemployment for six months and call you back.” In filing her claim she signed a statement in which she said she was waiting to go back to work with the postal service and that the post office is “where I want to work.”
The sole question is whether there is substantial support for the hearing officer’s finding that claimant was entitled to unemployment compensation under the statute. The district court found such evidence lacking and reversed the finding. On this appeal the majority sides with the hearing officer. I believe the district court reached the proper result and I therefore dissent.
After claimant discovered that her failure to seek work disqualified her for unemployment compensation, she recanted her earlier statement and insisted she had been “misunderstood.” She then testified before the hearing officer that she had indeed been looking for work. The hearing officer accepted this statement as substantial evidence of the fact. This completely overlooks the remainder of claimant’s testimony explaining what she meant by “seeking work.” What she said she did and what she actually did bear little resemblance to each other. The evidence shows the following facts without dispute:
1. Claimant refused a job offer from her old employer, New Homestead.
2. She testified that over a period of more than nine weeks she sought employment at only two places. One was at the local sheriff’s office where she said she could get a job “if we had a different sheriff”. Since there wasn’t a different sheriff, it is- difficult to see how this could be construed as “earnestly and actively seeking work.”
3. Her other employment contact was at a place identified in the record only as U.F.S.
4. In addition she said she “intended” to seek work with a company planning to build a plant near Guthrie Center.
This was the sum total of her job endeavors over a nine-week period.
Assuming the U.F.S. contact was made in good faith, this single job inquiry over an extended period does not constitute “being available for work” or “earnestly and actively seeking work”, as the statute provides, nor does it comply with the Job Service rule demanding that an individual act *273as a “normal, prudent person who is out of work and seeking work.”
Taking claimant’s testimony as a whole rather than only the statement upon which the hearing officer and the majority rely, I cannot find substantial support for this claim. On the contrary the evidence is undisputed that she refused one job offer; made only one legitimate employment contact; never wavered from her intention to return to the postal service as soon as possible; and was content to bide her time until then while collecting unemployment compensation. Ironically New Homestead, an employer she left voluntarily and whose renewed job offer she rejected, must now contribute to the unemployment compensation she will receive.
REYNOLDSON, C. J., and LARSON, J., join this dissent.