Florida’s unemployment mess: It’s not over | Commentary
Three months ago, everyone knew Florida’s unemployment system was a fiasco.
More than 800,000 people had applied for help. Only 4% had gotten it.
If you were giving the state a grade, it would’ve been F-minus-minus.
Gov. Ron DeSantis admitted the system was a failure and vowed to fix it. And after investing tens of millions of dollars into the broken system, many more people got paid. About 1.7 million people so far.
But not everyone.
As of last week, more than 200,000 applications — approximately the population of Tallahassee — still hadn’t been processed.
The issue has shifted out of the spotlight, but the desperation continues.
State Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith says he still gets frantic and frustrated calls every day. “One would think after four months of requests for help with unemployment, things would have died down,” said the Orlando Democrat. “One would be wrong.”
But precisely how many people have been stiffed out of benefits they are owed?
I can’t tell you. The state simply doesn’t provide answers. Not to me. Not to the applicants.
I’ve heard from something like 1,500 of them — and lost sleep over it. If you read a note from a stressed-out mother unsure whether she’ll be able to pay her rent, it haunts you.
Then read another 100. Or 500. Or 1,000.
And it’s not just me. I chatted with some of my media peers covering this mess on the front lines. They agreed this has been one of the strangest and most frustrating stories they’ve ever covered.
We can’t get straight answers. And sometimes, we turn into make-shift case workers, taking claim-ID numbers and addresses and forwarding them to state workers or legislators on behalf of frustrated Floridians who can’t get anyone to answer the phone.
“If you had specific questions, you didn’t really get them answered,” said WFTV reporter Christopher Heath, who has produced dozens of stories on the issue — and had the added irony of his own wife, who temporarily lost her job as a salon worker, never receiving benefit checks. “She’s called. She’s texted them. We never got any answers.”
Heath’s family was able to get by. Others weren’t so lucky. One mother told him: “We’re running out of food right now. No money for medication, nothing.”
It was similar for WKMG’s Mike Holfield, who said his station still gets 30 to 100 calls and emails a week from people “down to the last of their savings, all trying to get benefits they are entitled to.”
Holfield said the calls come from “people who have turned to me as their last hope.”
I’m not surprised that local journalists — despite being demonized by some as fake-news-enemies-of-the-people — are working so hard. But this is not how a state benefits system is supposed to work.
At one point in May, DeSantis, who was tired of reading all these hard-luck stories, staged a small tantrum at a press conference in Orlando.
In response to hard-hitting questions from yet another local TV reporter who has relentlessly pursued this story, Greg Angel of Spectrum News 13, DeSantis lost his cool and suggested many of the complaints from unpaid Floridians might not be legitimate.
“Did you vet any of them?” DeSantis barked at the reporters. “Did you vet them?”
I was taken aback for one main reason … his administration won’t allow it.
I have asked time and again for details about readers who haven’t been paid and don’t know why. Never once have state officials addressed or confirmed the validity of their claims — even though they are for people who had not only granted permission for their account information to be accessed but were desperate for it. DeSantis was putting on a show, demanding reporters do something his administration won’t allow.
Still, I collected work-history details from distressed, laid-off workers and sent them to the state’s unemployment officials.
The good news: Most of those people told me they soon started getting their benefits ... after waiting months. And I’m grateful to state employees for helping those people, including some in the communications office.
Here’s the bad news: It should not require the help of a newspaper columnist or TV reporter for citizens to get benefits to which they are entitled.
Or that of a legislator. Smith and a number of his colleagues — Republicans and Democrats — have personally called attention to many cases. (Holfield, for instance, mentioned working with the offices of both Republican Sen. David Simmons and Democrat Sen. Linda Stewart.)
Legislators are probably the best resource for laid-off workers who want answers ... though some legislators are definitely more helpful than others.
One of the hardest working has been Orlando Democrat Anna Eskamani, who has been flagging applications at midnight, 4 a.m., whenever they come in, and sharing them on Twitter.
“Our email is flooded with new cases,” she said this week.
Some of the unresolved cases are complex. Maybe an applicant applied years ago and still has an open account. Is the confusion understandable? Yes. But the state’s flawed (yet costly) system doesn’t empower or even allow citizens to fix their own problems.
As a result, many just flail around online every day or try unsuccessfully to get someone on the phone. “Applying for unemployment benefits in Florida is like Groundhog Day,” Smith said. “It never gets better.”
Yes, the system is overwhelmed. But as Heath said: “Other states didn’t have problems like this.”
That’s because Florida’s system was designed to fail. It was created by former Gov. Rick Scott, whose administration flatly said it wanted to find a way to curb benefits, and approved by a GOP-majority Legislature. (See the May 5 column: “Q&A: Why is Florida’s unemployment such a disaster? Because it was meant to be.”)
We’re now seeing the painful results.
Holfield’s station has raised more than $50,000 from viewers who wanted to help families at their wit’s end. That’s impressive … and yet also pathetic that it comes to that.
Another 67,000 Floridians filed for benefits last week as this crippling recession continues. I still hear from many of them. I still lose sleep.
I wonder if those who created this mess, and those now in charge of fixing it, do too.
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