March 29, 2024

Judge OKs jobless pay for woman who bashed agency bosses

DES MOINES — A former Iowa Workforce Development worker who’d once described her boss as rude has been awarded unemployment benefits.

Trudi Snyder was fired after complaining to colleagues last August that agency director Beth Townsend was “obnoxiously rude” and later comparing the agency management to “the Gestapo” — the World War II Nazis’ secret police.

Snyder reportedly told her superiors at a subsequent conduct hearing that, as a staff trainer, she didn’t realize it was her job to “put a happy face on everything.”

The agency eventually challenged Snyder’s application for jobless benefits because she’d been fired for job-related misconduct. In many cases that disqualifies a person from collecting the benefits.

Last week Administrative Law Judge Amanda Atherton ruled against Workforce Development and awarded Snyder the benefits, saying: “That employees complain about work, their co-workers and their managers is a fact of life.”