Florida ends year with tens of thousands of workers still receiving unemployment assistance

At least 168,000 Florida workers were still receiving unemployment assistance as 2020 came to a close, data released Thursday showed — a measure of the extreme economic toll that the pandemic continues to produce.

By comparison, just 36,000 workers were receiving benefits this same time last year.

For the week that ended

Dec. 26, the U.S. Department of Labor said Thursday that Florida saw 23,053 new claims for regular jobless benefits and 17,006 new claims for federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), the program for workers, such as Uber drivers, who are not eligible for regular state unemployment. Another 125,325 workers were already receiving benefits heading into that week.

Nationally, initial claims for unemployment benefits dropped modestly last week, the Labor Department reported, although they remained very high by historical standards at more than 800,000.

The total figure of workers still receiving benefits in the state is not known, because Florida reports neither the number of ongoing PUA claims — the only U.S. state to not do so — nor the number of ongoing claims for the federal Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, which extends unemployment assistance eligibility for an additional 13 weeks. The only other state to not report the latter figure is Georgia.

In an October email to the Miami Herald, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity said those unreported figures were not a priority, but that they intended to publish them in the future. A spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comments Thursday.

Year-end statistics show nearly 2.2 million individuals, or approximately one out of every five Florida workers, has received unemployment benefits during the pandemic.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump signed a bill that will see unemployment filers gain an additional $300 in federal assistance. The bill also extends the PUA and PEUC programs until at least March. And it set up a new program, Mixed Earner Unemployment Compensation assistance, which provides an additional $100 for workers, such as gig workers, who might have received both 1099 and W-2 work forms from employers.

In a note to clients Dec. 23, Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at research group Pantheon Macroeconomics, said the labor market has continued to deteriorate heading into the end of the year as coronavirus cases continue to surge.

“We hope [consumer] spending will stabilize in January and then begin to creep higher in February, but the current picture is quite bleak,” he said.

This report was supplemented with information from The New York Times.