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Florida courts take liberal interpretation of employee ‘misconduct’

This article was written with a Florida law focus and may not be relevant to other jurisdictions.

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This article originally appeared in the February 18, 2007 edition of Boca Raton News, www.bocanews.com. Reprinted with permission.

In an earlier column, we discussed that an employee who voluntarily quits his or her employment without good cause can be excluded from receiving unemployment compensation benefits. This week, we look at another basis for exclusion from benefits - discharge for “misconduct connected with work.”

The unemployment compensation statute is a social welfare statute drafted and construed in favor of awarding the former employee benefits. Thus, while the statute excludes a worker from receiving unemployment compensation benefits, if the worker was terminated for “misconduct connected with work,” the phrase has a very narrow definition. Often, even if an employer has good grounds for terminating an employee, those grounds may not serve as a basis for disqualifying the worker from benefits under the unemployment compensation statute.

In their weekly Boca Raton News column, Hodgson Russ partners Larry Corman and Glenn Rissman discuss the liberality with which Florida's unemployment compensation statute is applied in favor of claimants.