Biden taps Miami politician to lead Labor Department’s unemployment programs
A Miami politician and former critic of Florida’s beleaguered unemployment system is now being named by the president to lead nationwide unemployment assistance efforts.
Former Miami-Dade state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, a Democrat, was nominated by President Joe Biden on Friday to lead the Department of Labor’s unemployment assistance arm.
Rodríguez’s position, assistant secretary for employment and training, will require confirmation from the U.S. Senate.
“If confirmed by the Senate, it would be the honor of a lifetime to serve my country at the Department of Labor and join the Biden-Harris Administration in ensuring a strong and competitive workforce,” Rodríguez said in a statement.
The Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration is a 1,000-person agency with an $8.6 billion budget and a wide array of responsibilities, including federal government job training programs, worker dislocation programs, grants to states for employment service programs and unemployment insurance benefits.
Rodríguez declined to comment when reached by the Miami Herald.
During the pandemic, Rodríguez, 42, was a fierce critic of Florida’s unemployment system, which delayed payments to eligible Floridians after it failed due to technical issues and increased demand. He told the U.S. Senate a year ago that thousands of Floridians were still waiting for benefits after applying during the first weeks of the pandemic in March 2020.
Rodríguez said the state’s unemployment system “suffered from willful neglect for a long time” under former Republican Gov. Rick Scott, now in the Senate, and the problems weren’t a secret to Gov. Ron DeSantis before the pandemic.
He said the problems were no secret, with “audit after audit,” and that DeSantis knew about the issues because one of the audits was “on the governor’s desk” when he came into office. And he argued that the state was incapable of doling out expanded unemployment benefits passed by Congress, which shut out jobless Floridians from an extra $600 a week in benefits.
“Our rate of bringing people on to the program when they are ineligible for traditional unemployment is very low, 28%,” Rodríguez said to the U.S. Senate last year. “The state has been awarding the minimum benefit level as a default and created an extremely cumbersome system for people who are 1099 [gig] workers to be able to establish how much they’re owed. That rate is far below most states. We’re leaving about three dollars in Washington for every dollar we draw down.”
Rodríguez, if confirmed, would be one of the highest-ranking Floridians in the Biden administration. He lost his reelection bid last year by 34 votes to Republican state Sen. Ileana Garcia.
Their tight election is now the subject of an ongoing public corruption case over allegations that former state Sen. Frank Artiles recruited and paid a no-party candidate, Alexis Pedro Rodriguez, to sway the outcome.
Artiles and Alexis Rodriguez are facing several felony charges for their roles in the election, and a trial is set for next month. Garcia has not been accused of wrongdoing and took office in November 2020 after a recount.
José Javier Rodríguez, who was elected to the Florida Senate in 2016, was frequently mentioned as a potential candidate for U.S. Congress in the 2022 election, and ran for former U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s Congressional seat after she announced her retirement in 2017. Rodríguez dropped out of the congressional race before the Democratic primary.
Rodríguez, who was also a state representative from 2012 to 2016, currently works as an attorney at Sugarman & Susskind, PA in Miami, representing employees and labor unions along with pension and benefit funds.
Miami Herald reporter Samantha J. Gross contributed to this report.
This story was originally published July 2, 2021 at 12:16 PM.