Unemployment and jury duty

[tigertoy]

Does reporting for jury duty, sitting around the courthouse for a while, and being sent home count as "not available for work" for unemployment purposes in Illinois?

Does jury duty pay need to be reported as income earned when claiming unemployment?

Why can't I find the answers to these questions on line?

Comments

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

In cases like these, it is easier to get forgiveness than permission. Best to assume that you are available for work even if you are on Jury Duty. And in Texas at least, you can give your Jury Duty pay to a charity right at the court, so you need not worry about it or declaring it or taxes, etc at all.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Of course, asking the Unemployment office what to do would probably be wisest. It cannot be the first time they've heard that question.

[danebassett.livejournal.com]

I would say that it DOES count as being available.

you have to claim that money as income but the $1 a day IF you get on a jury isn't going to put you over the limit.

I would try searching the UNEMPLOYMENT website rather than the jury one.... Also might be a valid question to use to ask to postpone your service... it would cause a hardship if it means you can't get UEI and jurors pay at the same time...


Good luck, sucky time to be asked to serve.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

This time I hit pay dirt with "jury duty site:www.ides.state.il.us".

Mandatory service on a jury shall not constitute employment under the Unemployment Insurance Act (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1987, ch. 48, par. 300 et seq.) Nor shall payments made for such services constitute wages

Google is not smart enough to recast searches as references to term X on pages that are about subject Y. Pages that are actually about subject Y often fail to actually use the term Y often enough to come up in the list. I, on the other hand, don't seem to be smart enough to describe subject Y in terms that will find pages about it but that won't find so many other hits that I'm swamped. (In this case, trying to find references to "jury duty" on pages that are about "unemployment in Illinois" did not work. Not constraining the search by specifying Illinois buried me in references to California and Massachusetts, but including Illinois buried me in summary pages that a short entry about each state and somewhere on the page had the words "unemployment" and "jury duty".)