Amid coronavirus crash, Florida’s notoriously stingy jobless benefits just got less onerous
Newly laid-off workers across Florida are encountering an unemployment system that is struggling to handle the increased demand for services and offers some of the least generous benefits in the country.
On Thursday afternoon, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced at least one change to make it easier for the tens of thousands of now-jobless Floridians — he plans to waive the requirement that people receiving unemployment benefits also continue applying for new jobs.
“Normally, those are good because you want people to seek work first, but in this case, because of the shock to the system, we want to be there and be helpful,” he said.
David Carson, 28, a former bartender at Coconut Grove restaurant Tigertail & Mary, applied for unemployment the day he was laid off. At least, he tried to.
The state-run website gave him multiple error messages, which extended the application process to a two-day affair. First, he had to fill out the initial part of the form on the Department of Economic Opportunity’s website. Then he was sent to an entirely separate site to submit his résumé. That didn’t work, so he had to fill everything in by hand.
Hours later, Carson finished the application. But he said he still has to fill out a request for disbursement at the end of the month that didn’t specify when he’d get paid, or how much.
“I’m not expecting to get anything from the unemployment system for at least a month,” he said.
The state’s Department of Economic Opportunity confirmed that it has seen a “drastic increase” in filings this week, but declined to share specific numbers, citing guidance from the federal Department of Labor. Through last Friday, Florida saw a 17 percent increase in claims.
The department’s phone lines were jammed this week, with more than 76,000 calls from Monday to Wednesday, up from 28,000 calls last week, according to department spokesperson Tiffany Vause. She said the department plans to hire 100 additional workers across the state to help answer calls and guide applicants through the process and would authorize overtime for existing workers. It will expand the call center to be open seven days a week beginning March 23.
Workers who successfully file a claim will find that Florida’s current unemployment benefits are among the stingiest in the nation.
Currently, Florida workers who lose their jobs are eligible for up to 12 weeks of unemployment at a maximum of $275 a week.
That represents the fewest number of weeks of any state in the country, according to the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities. And the $275 maximum weekly benefit puts Florida among the bottom five states, according to the Department of Labor.
And that’s for workers who qualify.
Fewer than a third of qualified applicants receive benefits in Florida, which puts the Sunshine State at the bottom of national rankings, said state Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez, a Democrat representing Miami-Dade. He’s heard of people spending hours on the site this week and still not accessing state benefits.
“It’s almost designed to limit the number of people who actually make it through. It’s like running the gauntlet,” he said.
He’s called on the state’s Department of Economic Opportunity to reform the system to make it simpler for laid-off workers to get paid.
“Coming into this crisis we already had a barely functioning system that was the worst in the nation in terms of people being able to get any benefits that they were actually entitled to,” he said. “This week there’s a tsunami of claims. I don’t know if the system can handle it.”
Unemployment benefits are funded by payments made by employers on the first $7,000 in an employee’s wages. For the past five years, most Florida businesses have paid the lowest possible rate of .1 percent, and had the lowest average employer tax amount in the country in 2018.
Florida was among a number of states that cut unemployment benefits in the years following the 2008 recession, in part to eliminate debts the state unemployment funds had racked up when turning to the federal government to pay benefits for workers who lost their jobs during the recession. In 2013, Florida repaid the $3.5 billion its unemployment fund had borrowed.
With the leisure and hospitality industries accounting for nearly one in seven jobs in the state, group chats across Florida are filled with formerly employed restaurant workers and bartenders buzzing with questions about how to navigate the state’s onerous unemployment website.
When Guenn Johnsen-Gentry, a former line cook at Edison: Food+Drink Lab in Tampa, followed the link a coworker shared to apply for unemployment, she got error message after error message. At one point, the system tried to tell her to show up in person to a closed office, despite government warnings to avoid crowded places.
When she called the phone lines for help, she heard an automated response telling her the system was over capacity, and then it hung up on her.
“The system is definitely overwhelmed. You’re sort of on your own,” said the 46-year-old.
As Johnsen-Gentry filled out the application, she tried to note her special circumstances — closure due to the coronavirus — as often as she could, but she still felt like she filled out more than she had to.
In California, where her daughter just lost her server job, the unemployment website has a special section for people who lost their jobs because of the coronavirus.
“Here, you’re just kinda globbed in there with everyone else,” she said.
The federal jobs relief package calls on states to relax some of their rules for unemployed workers affected by the coronavirus, such as requirements that they actively seek a job or waiting periods before they receive benefits.
Before the governor announced the change in policy Thursday evening, the prospect of applying for new jobs under these circumstances struck now-jobless Floridians like Johnsen-Gentry as impossible to complete.
“This is the irony of this entire situation. Everything is shut down. Nobody is accepting applications, there’s nothing to apply for,” she said. “You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people with families who have two more paychecks before they’re out of food.”
This story was originally published March 19, 2020 at 7:07 PM.
