Legal Question in Employment Law in California

The EDD expects you to be available to accept work, and that basically means standard full-time working hours during the week. If you are already working full-time, only being available to accept work on evenings and weekends doesn't count because you are not "available to accept work," even if you aren't getting paid for the work you are doing.

As you may know, when you fill out an unemployment claim form, you need to state whether there was any reason you could not have accepted full-time work each workday, and you must be looking for work each week. If you are already working full-time hours, you couldn't truthfully state that you could have accepted full-time work.

If the unemployment system were structured so that any employee who works full-time on a commission basis could be on unemployment at the same time as long as they weren't earning any commissions, imagine how many (more) people would be on unemployment right now. The system just would not work.

I know this is much easier said than done in this economy, but if you aren't happy with the commission-only position, keep looking until you find a paying position, or continue to work hard so that you can start earning those commissions.

Good luck!