Congratulations on making it to the end of a difficult term. We hope you’ve managed to stay safe and healthy – both physically and emotionally – and that the break will be relaxing and enjoyable. With that being said, we wanted to send a quick end-of-term email to inform you about a few important things.
Effective at the start of the winter term, the base-rate of pay for a 3.0 unit course will be $7630.55. You are not likely to see an amended appointment letter reflecting the rate, but the payroll system will increase your rate to this amount automatically. You should be able to double-check this on your pay stubs- please let us know if there are any concerns.
Log-in details and information guides on using the new homeweb.ca website are located on McMaster’s Employee and Family Assistance Program webpage here.
The first pay in the Winter term, for those of you who are employed, will be on January 15th and the first day of work will be January 6th. This means you should be able to collect EI for a brief period of time prior to January 6th, if you have enough insurable hours. For information on EI, click here. If you have already served a withholding period in the past 52 weeks, you will be able to collect EI sooner. If you have not served a withholding period, you can serve one week over the holidays and should be able to collect EI sooner in late April. If you have yet to serve the one-week withholding period in the past 52 weeks and plan on accessing EI over the spring/summer, we would strongly encourage you to apply for EI over the holidays to serve the withholding period.
In certain instances, it is possible to both work and collect EI (with some clawbacks) if the amount of work have in the winter has dropped substantially from the work you had during the fall term. More information is available here.
The employer will upload your ROE automatically to Service Canada. You can apply for EI at any point after you see it uploaded to your Service Canada site.