Some Floridians are still waiting on jobless checks

It’s been three months since Rebecca Carlton, a scenic artist at Disney World, applied for Florida unemployment compensation. During that time, she said she’s faced complete silence from state workers who are supposed to be processing her claim, making her wait for checks she fears will never come.

She’s one of the unlucky people labeled “pending” or “active” or even “eligible,” but whose application, for some reason, is stuck inside the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity’s struggling system that continues to be fraught with errors and glitches.

She’s one of the thousands of jobless Floridians who when Gov. Ron DeSantis asked reporters in May, “Who’s waiting?” thought, “I am.”

Carlton, 51, applied for benefits on March 22, after she was furloughed from her job of eight years with the Buena Vista Construction Co., Disney’s in-house firm of carpenters, landscapers, painters and other workers. She worked as an artist, helping paint murals in the town square of Epcot’s Germany pavilion and at Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway in Hollywood Studio’s, among many other places.

It took days to complete the application because the system kept crashing, but finally she was

deemed eligible for payments. But then, no money came.

Unable to get through the DEO’s clogged phone lines, she went to the Polk County career center near her house and only then did she find out the problem: an open unemployment case she filed in 2014 when she was laid off from the same job. She’d only been out of work for a week, so Carlton never followed up on it.

But the DEO agents that Carlton has managed to reach tell her they aren’t authorized to close out the old claim. Legislators Carlton’s contacted for help have escalated her situation, but it’s still unresolved.

“The sheer frustration of not being able to get anyone to talk to or fix the situation — it’s definitely taken a toll on me,” Carlton said.

A spokeswoman for the DEO, Paige Landrum, said sometimes applications are held up while the department verifies everything. During that process, she said the department confirms the claimant’s identify and investigates whether they’ve received wages from a previous employer or filed an unemployment claim in another state.

But it’s unclear why for some that process has taken months. The DEO in emails to applicants has said it’s “working diligently to process as many claims as soon as possible.”

The DEO recommends that applicants login to claim their weeks, even if they are still labeled “pending.”

DeSantis, who in May ordered a state investigation of the $77 million CONNECT system, calling it a waste of taxpayer money, boasts that nearly all credible claims have been paid out. As of Thursday, the DEO dashboard stated that 100% of the 1,621,376 eligible claimants who applied have been paid, but it doesn’t say how many have received only partial payments.

But more than 781,000 claims have been rejected and over 182,000 claims are still waiting to be verified, as unemployment in the Orlando metro area jumped to 22.6%, the worst in the state. Countless people have also not received their weekly $600 federal unemployment checks that abruptly stopped because of what the DEO described as “technology concerns.”

DeSantis has blamed errors in applications for why so many people have been deemed ineligible and, for the most part, ignored concerns over workers who’ve been waiting for benefits nearly since the pandemic began.

“It’s been a difficult economic situation, and to have that type of money come out, to have 1.5 million claims paid out, individual claimants, that’s much better off than we were at the beginning of April when the system was basically broken in half,” the governor told

“The sheer frustration of not being able to get anyone to talk to or fix the situation — it’s definitely taken a toll on me.”

Rebecca Carlton, a scenic artist at Disney World

reporters Monday.

Sitting in the virtual stack of unverified applications is one from Patricia James, a Kissimmee woman in her 60s who was laid off from the Days Hotel by Wyndham, where she worked for six years as a reservation supervisor. She applied for unemployment on April 9.

One DEO agent told her not all of her information had been properly inputted after the CONNECT system, which was initially designed to handle only 5,000 users at once, crashed in April as millions of Floridians attempted to fill out applications. Later, another agent told her more information was needed from her employer.

“To date, I have not received one penny,” James said. “I feel helpless. I feel hopeless.”

Florida’s beleaguered system has now caught the attention of federal legislators who say the situation has reached “dire” levels.

U.S. Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Ron Wyden of Oregon called for a federal investigation into Florida’s “uniquely poor” handling of the unemployment crisis and the DEO’s “failure to process unemployment claims and deliver benefits in a timely fashion.”

And on Wednesday, U.S. Reps. Richard Neal, D Massachusetts, and Stephanie Murphy, D-Orlando, wrote to Department of Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia to “better understand how Florida was allowed to enter this crisis with an unemployment insurance program designed to fail workers.”

“It is unacceptable that hundreds of thousands of Floridians are still waiting for DEO to process their unemployment benefits or to pay those benefits in full,” Murphy and Neal said in their letter.

The lawmakers criticized the cuts made to Florida’s unemployment program in 2011 under former Republican Gov. Rick Scott that Murphy and Neal said “provide inadequate benefits and deliberately limit access.”

Because of those changes, lobbied for by corporations who wanted to reduce their unemployment taxes following the Great Recession, Florida workers can only collected unemployment for 12 weeks, compared with other states that allow 26. Weekly benefits are capped at just $275.

The legislators also blamed inaction from DeSantis who they say ignored multiple audits, including one in 2019 after he took office, that warned of persistent glitches with the CONNECT system. DeSantis has brushed off that criticism as partisan politics.

Carlton, the Disney painter, said fortunately she was able to defer her car and cellphone payments and the lot rent on her micro-home is only $380 a month. Twice, though, she’s had to ask to borrow money from her daughter Hannah, who’s in her 20s.

“It broke my pride a bit because I was a single mom, I was always taking care of her. I shouldn’t have to go to my child for help ... and that was my only choice,” Carlton

said.

She hasn’t heard when she’ll be called back to work. Unlike the majority of Disney World’s cast members, she isn’t scheduled to return when the parks reopen this month.

For James, who was laid off from the hotel, she’ll have to reapply for her job.

But they aren’t giving up on getting the unemployment they’re owed.

“I will continue to persist until I get it,” Carlton said. “There’s no backing down as far as I’m concerned. If I need to go to Tallahassee and stand outside the Governor’s Mansion with a protest sign, that’s what I’ll do.”