Report: Workers suffering before economy shut down

Even before the coronavirus pandemic sparked an economic implosion, some 350,000 Central Florida working households — and a third of those statewide — were barely able to make ends meet. And that doesn’t include the roughly 13 percent of households that were living in poverty.

According to a report to be released Tuesday by the nonprofit Heart of Florida United Way, of Florida’s 7.8 million households, nearly 2.6 million were unable to afford the basic expenses of housing, child care, food, transportation and health care, despite having jobs.

The report, based largely on 2018 Census Bureau data, focuses on what the United Way calls the ALICE population — for assetlimited, income-constrained, employed. That group, the report found, grew by 66 percent in Florida over the past decade as wages remained largely stagnant but the cost of essentials continued to climb. When added to those living in poverty, they made up nearly half the households in Orange County.

“No matter how hard ALICE families worked, the gap between their wages and the cost of basics just kept widening,” said Jeff Hayward, president and CEO of the Heart of Florida United Way, which serves Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties. “We knew that one unexpected emergency is all it would take to send ALICE families into a financial tailspin. That emergency is here, and it’s COVID-19,” the disease caused by the coronavirus.

The pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of ALICE families and the Central Florida economy, Hayward said, as tens of thousands of tourism-industry workers and others in low-paying jobs have been laid off or furloughed.

Janelle Cabrera, 41, a single mother of two, is among them.

Before the coronavirus hit, she was taking online college classes toward an associate degree and working in a campus coffee shop at Seminole State. On March 23, she was furloughed as classes moved online.

“My work doesn’t start again until August, and I just now got my first full two-week unemployment check from the state,” she said. “It just seems like it’s impossible to make it here if you’re not already made.”

According to the United Way calculations, the cost of basic needs in Florida ranged annually from $24,600 for a single adult, or $12.30 an hour, to $69,516 for a family of four with an infant and a preschooler, or $17.38 an hour.

The state’s median hourly wage was well below those figures at $22,040, or $11.02 an hour.

“Through no fault of their own, ALICE families have been priced out of economic stability, setting the stage for the scope of this crisis,” said United For ALICE National Director Stephanie Hoopes.

The report did have a bright spot: Overall, fewer Central Florida households were living in poverty in 2018 compared to 2016. And the number of households in Seminole County that were either part of the ALICE population or living in poverty dropped from 40 percent of total households to 33 percent.

On the flip side, the number in Osceola County rose from 57 percent to 64 percent, while the number in Orange County re