Your Tax Dollars At Work; State Agency EDD Ordered [Once Again] To Pay A Man His Unemployment Insurance .  .  .[Editor’s Note: No Wonder Poor People Have Trouble Finding Representation].

The man’s work shoes were still in good shape, so he decided to donate his $150/year work shoe allowance for new work shoes for a friend. His attempted gesture was against company policy and he was fired. The Employment Development Department [EDD] refused the man’s claim for unemployment insurance. Ordered twice by the trial court and once by the Court of Appeal to give the man his benefits, EDD refused and the matter ended up at the Court of Appeal once again. In the present appeal, the appellate opinion states: “The Department, unfortunately, has shown itself repeatedly unable to see the forest in this matter, instead focusing doggedly on the bureaucratic trees.” The appellate court concluded: “The Department’s repeated error in this matter was its stubborn refusal to acknowledge that the exigencies of Robles’s extremely atypical situation could not be adequately addressed through recourse to ‘standard processing’ pursuant to its usual regulatory scheme. As a result, the trial court in this matter was confronted with a situation in which an individual who, though clearly substantively entitled to unemployment benefits under state law, had been denied those benefits for over three years. It has now been over five years since Robles, albeit misguidedly, offered to buy a pair of shoes for a friend. Enough is enough.” (Robles v. Employment Development Dept. (Cal. App. First Dist., Div. 4; May 4, 2015) 236 Cal.App.4th 530, [186 Cal.Rptr.3d 707].)