Remember to pay your membership fee when your employment ends

Please remember to make sure that your unemployment fund membership remains valid uninterruptedly while you are unemployed or temporarily laid off. You can only be paid unemployment benefits if you have paid your membership fees. The membership fee of IAET-kassa cannot be deducted automatically from your earnings-related allowance, and instead you need to pay it separately.

Any membership fee payments made by your employer also end when your employment ends, and you will need to pay your membership fee yourself thereafter. If you are a member of an unemployment fund through a union, you should contact your union directly when your employment ends.

Only members of unemployment funds are entitled to an earnings-related allowance. According to IAET-kassa’s rules, fund membership must be cancelled retroactively from the beginning of the year when membership fee payments stop. As unions cannot cancel unemployment fund memberships, they notify IAET-kassa of any missed payments. If a member is still unemployed, the fund cannot resume earnings-related allowance payments until overdue membership fee payments have been taken care of.

IAET-kassa always consults members who have received benefits by letter before cancelling a membership. The letter will state the period during which an earnings-related allowance has been paid and the amount. The member is given an opportunity to catch up on their membership fee payments. If the member still does not make their membership fee payments by the deadline given, their membership in IAET-kassa will have to be cancelled. Once the cancellation decision becomes final, the member will no longer be able to make membership fee payments or avoid debt collection.

Example: Joonas’s employment contract with X ended on 30 September 2016, after which his employer stopped making membership fee payments. Joonas has been receiving an earnings-related allowance since October 2016. If Joonas fails to make his unemployment fund membership fee payments despite a reminder as of 1 October 2016, all the earnings-related allowance payments made to him will need to be recovered in full, and his membership in the unemployment fund will need to be cancelled retroactively as of 31 December 2015.