At least 800 taking jobless calls laid off

State ends contracts with centers helping in surge

At least 800 workers who had been assisting Florida’s unemployment agency with handling calls from jobless residents are themselves being laid off this month, after the Department of Economic Opportunity terminated multimillion-dollar contracts with two of its call center providers.

AECOM, one of the companies whose contract was severed last week — which became public after screenshots of company emails were posted online — will lay off about 800 people, said company spokesman Michael Chee.

Some of the affected workers were employed at two of AECOM’s subsidiaries, New Jersey-based Artech and Louisiana-based Plexos Group. AECOM’s headquarters are in Los Angeles. However, all of the employees who had been working as call reps for the DEO were Floridians and working remotely.

United Data Technologies, the other company whose contract was ended early, had been providing DEO with another 155 customer representatives, but UDT did not return requests asking whether those employees would be kept on.

It’s still unclear why the companies were let go. Both told the Orlando Sentinel they were notified by DEO that it was due to a funding shortage and were assured it was not because of their performance.

“We have no reason to believe there was any other issue involved other than financial concerns,” Chee said.

AECOM’s one-year contract that be

gan April 24 totaled $24.6 million and UDT’s which started April 8 totaled $12.5.

However, in a statement to the press, DEO spokeswoman Tiffany Vause said DEO chose to end contracts with some of its vendors “who are not providing as high quality services” in favor of keeping on other companies “who have provided higher skilled and fully trained representatives.”

The DEO still has active contracts with two other major call center providers and has some in-house call reps. Lighthouse Works, an Orlando customer call center operation that employs sighted and visually impaired workers, is also still helping take calls.

In all, Vause said the DEO now has about 3,000 call reps.

As of Thursday, the agency has received over 3.1 million unemployment claims and paid out almost $10.5 billion to eligible applicants. But it has struggled to keep up with the flood of applications and non-stop calls from Floridians trying to collect benefits.

According to call center contracts, in early March, calls to the DEO had increased to 27,000 per week and DEO answered only 2% of them. The average wait time to speak with an agent was 6½ hours. In late March, the number of calls spiked to 864,313 one week. The DEO answered fewer than 1%.

Now, four months since the coronavirus took hold, some Floridians have still not received benefits or been able to contact DEO agents who can fix problems with their claims.