When one loses one’s job, being unemployed certainly can free up some time to take a trip or visit people that one otherwise would not have the time to do due to employment constraints. Taking such trips, however, may have the unintended, and perhaps unexpected, consequence of having one’s unemployment benefits discontinued, as happened in the recent New Jersey case of Vialet v. Board of Review, Superior Court of New Jersey, Case No. A-1226-11T2.
The claimant in Vialet, Tanya S. Vialet, was unemployed and eligible for benefits under the applicable unemployment compensation law. She collected benefits for about two months, from early October 2010 to early December 2010, according to the opinion. Coincidentally to her termination from employment, Vialet was to travel to Jamaica on December 15, 2010, to be the maid of honor in her sister’s destination wedding. Vialet’s trip to Jamaica was originally scheduled to be a rather short trip. As it turned out, however, Vialet’s parents were of ill health and living in the Virgin Islands, and, since Vialet was in the Caribbean neighborhood, she flew there to pay her parents a visit after the wedding. Vialet planned to stay in the Virgin Islands until December 27 but could not return home until December 31, due to inclement weather, the opinion said. Vialet asserted that she would not have been able to start new employment, were she to have received an offer for the same, until January 2011, presumably due to her 16-day trip to parts of the Caribbean.
