I am going to address this issue in several articles (blogs) and focus only on Michigan law. Many other states including Florida are similar to Michigan in handling unemployment claims, but since there are differences, you want to check the law of the state that you're looking at before implementing any ideas I suggest.
An employee can qualify for unemployment benefits only if he has earned a certain amount of wages during his base period. The base is comprised of four calendar quarters, and the particular calendar quarters are determined from when the employee files his unemployment claim. So if the claim is filed in quarter six, then quarters one through four make up the base; quarter five is the lag quarter. If an employee cannot qualify using the regular base, then he can see if he can qualify using the alternate base, which in our example, would be quarters two through five, eliminating the lag quarter.
To qualify for benefits, the employee needs the following: 1) wages in at least two quarters of the base, 2) the wages in the high quarter of at least $1998, and 3) the wages in the entire base must be at least one and a half times the wages in the high quarter. If the wages in the base fails to satisfy the 1 1/2 times high quarter requirement, then there is an alternate earnings qualifier, which I'm not going into. If you want further information, the State of Michigan’ website is a good source.