Telecommuter in Florida Loses Case for Benefits

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Telecommuter in Florida Loses Case for Benefits

July 3, 2003
 By AL BAKER 




 

ALBANY, July 2 - A woman who used a laptop computer and a
phone line to work in Florida for a financial information
company on Long Island is ineligible for New York's
unemployment benefits, the state's highest court ruled
today. 

In issuing a 6-to-0 decision, the Court of Appeals weighed
in on the new legal front of telecommuting. The judges
delivered what they called the nation's first
interpretation of where employees in the virtual workplace
should turn when they lose their jobs. The court ruled that
people should seek unemployment benefits from the state
where they work, not from the state where their employer
is. 

The opinion could have wide implications in a world where
employees increasingly use the tools of the Internet to
perform work for employers based far away from them. But it
left the plaintiff, Maxine E. Allen, a former technical
specialist with Reuters America Inc., deeply disappointed.

"I had fought so long and honestly believed I was right,"
Ms. Allen, 38, said in a telephone interview today. "But we
will abide by our country's rules and laws; that is what
makes us great." 

Ms. Allen, who served as her own lawyer, said she would not
appeal the decision to the United States Supreme Court,
saying she simply did not know how to do so. Though she
lost, she said she was impressed by the way the court
system worked. She lives with her husband and children in
Maitland, Fla., just outside Orlando.

For now, the ruling caps a long legal struggle for Ms.
Allen, one with many twists. She lived in North Babylon,
N.Y., and she worked for the company at its Hauppauge
offices from October 1996 until she moved to Orlando, Fla.,
in July 1997, when her husband changed jobs, according to a
court summary of the case.

Once there, she set up an office in her new home. Reuters
paid for a phone line and gave her a laptop computer,
software and the security clearance needed to log on to the
company's mainframe computer in New York. But the company
ended that arrangement in March 1999 and offered her a job
back in New York, which she turned down, resigning.

<snip>

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