Month’s jobless rate rises to 7.6%
State unemployment checks could flow for 19 weeks next year
Out-of-work Floridians may be able to collect unemployment checks for as many as19 weeks in 2021, state officials said during a news conference Friday to discuss the unemployment rate hitting 7.6% in September.
Adrienne Johnston, chief of the Department of Economic Opportunity’s bureau of labor statistics, said payments would be extended from 12 to 19 weeks starting Jan.1 based on the threemonth average of July, August and September’s unemployment rates, which is 8.7%.
It’s unclear how many people will qualify for the extension, though.
Tiffany Vause, a spokeswoman for the DEO, said it would only apply to individuals whose “benefit year-end date,” which is
about a year after the initial date a claim is filed, has passed. To be eligible applicants also need to have worked in between their 2020 claim and when they submit a 2021 application and have earned at least three times their weekly benefit amount. The Florida Policy Institute, which studies unemployment policy, is currently researching whether DEO is correctly interpreting eligibility for the extension.
State Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, who has introduced a bill that would allow unemployed individuals to collect benefits for 26 weeks, said the extension will exclude many people.
“This is the rigged system that the Republican leadership supported, including Republicans in office running for reelection right now. And here were are witnessing how ridiculous this is because it’s not even helping the people who need it right now,” she said.
Friday’s unemployment report revealed that 770,000 Floridians are still not working because of the coronavirus, causing statewide unemployment to increase from 7.3% in August to 7.6% in September, on par with the 7.9% nationwide joblessness rate.
In the Orlando metropolitan area, unemployment dipped from 11% to 9.8%, marking the first time in months that the tourismdependent region didn’t top the list for highest unemployment. Now the Miami area does, at 13%. Still, that number represents 130,220 people in Orlando unem
ployed because of the virus.
At the county level, Osceola County — where a large concentration of theme park workers live and many residents call pay-by-theweek motels home — continues to see the most severe rates of joblessness at 13.3%. In Orange County, where layoffs at hotels, theme parks and airport concessionaires have displaced thousands of workers, the rate is 10.4%.
The unemployment extension announced by DEO is about four weeks shy of the maximum 23 weeks Floridians can collect when the three-month average the state uses rises above 10.5%, because it doesn’t take into account the early months of the pandemic when unemployment skyrocketed as high as 14.5%.
It also doesn’t factor in local unemployment rates. For example, Orlando’s peaked at 22.6% in May.
Eskamani said it’s another example that illustrates why states shouldn’t tether benefits to the unemployment rate. “Why does it matter what unemployment was in the third quarter? It doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
Florida was one of five states that after the 2008 recession adopted such a formula, according to the National Employment Law Project, tying the duration of unemployment benefits to historic jobless rates — a system that’s now come under scrutiny by Democrat legislators looking to reform Florida’s unemployment system and even some Republicans.
Florida adopted the formula in 2011 when the Republican-controlled Legislature voted to make it harder for out-of-work Floridians to get unemployment insurance and cut payments for those who qualify. Due to those changes, right now Floridians can only collect unemployment for 12 weeks because state unemployment had previously been at record-lows.
Floridians have largely relied on a federal program Congress rolled out in March that provides an additional13 weeks of benefits. According to data from the DEO, at least 615,553 are currently enrolled in that program, meaning they exhausted state benefits and still haven’t been called back to work or been able to find a new job.
The September jobless rate may not capture the severity of the job loss spurred by the pandemic, though, because it only takes into account residents who were unemployed around the second week of September.
Since then, Disney World announced it would lay off 28,000 U.S. employees, including 8,857 part-time union employees and 6,700 non-union employees at its Orlando parks. Universal also conducted another round of layoffs, and SeaWorld let go 1,900 employees who had been on unpaid furloughs.
Another 2,000-plus people have been laid off or furloughed since late September, according to notices filed with the state, including at two Hyatt Regency hotels, an airline-baggage sorting facility and Cuba Libre Restaurant & Rum Bar on International Drive.