Unemployment hits 16.2%
Highest local rate since state began tracking in 1976
The toll the coronavirus has inflicted on Florida workers hit a stunning milestone in April, spiking state unemployment to 12.9% and 16.2% in metro Orlando, the highest rate it’s been since the state began its current estimating process in 1976.
The higher number for the Orlando-Sanford-Kissimmee area is a sign of the intense impact the virus and government shutdowns have had on the region that counts on crowded theme parks, hotels and restaurants to sustain its economy.
“Obviously, we knew it would be significant,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said when asked about the jobless rate at a news conference in Jacksonville. “What we need to do ... is get people back to work and get public confidence back. Then we will get those jobs back.”
The unemployment numbers, released by the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity on Friday, had been expected to far exceed the revised 4.4% unemployment rate in March, as the brunt of affected workers suddenly found themselves jobless after DeSantis issued an executive order on April 1 for all nonessential businesses to close, and visitors to Florida’s tourism gems vanished.
“This is pretty much what we expected these numbers from April to look like, with a really large spike,” said Phoebe Fleming, director of research for the Orlando Economic Partnership. “Hopefully, we saw the peak of this in April.”
Unemployment in Osceola County was the worst in the state at 20.3%, with Orange County not far behind at 16.5%, in large part because of the mass furloughs at Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando.
In fact, statewide, the leisure industry workforce was the worst-trounced by the virus, losing 520,200 jobs last month. Nevada, another tourism hub, had the highest unemployment in the nation in April at 28.2%. But even other industries that in March appeared to have been less affected by the virus, such as construction, manufacturing and transportation, also saw deeper impacts in April.
“Really no industry was left untouched by these losses,” Fleming said.
The dramatic surge in joblessness follows years of historic lows in the Sunshine State. In February, Florida unemployment was at an all-time low of 2.8%. The latest numbers may not be fully representative of the impacts on workers, with many losing hours but still employed.
Nationally, the unemployment rate hit its highest level since the Great Depression in April, 14.7%, more than triple March’s figure and nearly double the unemployment rate during the housing and financial crisis from 2007 to 2009.
Fleming said she expects May figures to mirror those of April, but hopefully start to taper off in the summer, as more businesses reopen and people become more comfortable going out in public again. In Florida, restaurants and stores, barbershops and nail salons and now even gyms have been allowed to reopen at limited capacity.
Universal Orlando has asked for permission from the state to reopen June 5 and Legoland got the state’s OK to reopen on June 1.
Workers continue to struggle to receive benefits
The state numbers represent the more than 1.2 million out-of-work Floridians, who for months have struggled to navigate Florida’s unemployment system. DeSantis last week blamed user error for the now nearly 370,000 applications that have been deemed ineligible for state and federal benefits.
“DEO goes through this, and nine times out of 10, the application’s incomplete,” DeSantis said. “And I think if you have applied in that time period, and your application’s complete, and you qualify, I think 99.99% of those folks have been paid.”
Many applications, he said, haven’t been approved because they don’t include the applicant’s Social Security number or wage information. But many workers say they have been marked ineligible through no fault of their own.
This week, a new batch of workers were incorrectly disqualified from receiving benefits because they hadn’t been looking for a new job — a requirement to receive unemployment benefits in Florida that had been waived in an attempt to process more applications. Noor Elgallad, a senior sales manager for Hilton hotels in South Florida, said he applied on April 5 after being furloughed from his job and was marked ineligible three weeks later. When he finally got through to the call center to ask why he was ineligible, he learned it was because his company had changed its tax entity name from his most recent W-2 in 2019.
It was “Waldorf Astoria Employer LLC” now, with a Tennessee address, instead of “Waldorf Management LLC” with a Florida address. Seeing a mismatch, the system marked him ineligible. It was only through Elgallad’s perseverance, calling the call center dozens of times over several days, that he was able to eke out an explanation from a representative who quickly input his Social Security number and identified the error, he said. Because of the delay, he’s had to defer payments and dip into his savings to make rent.
“I would think that they would have foreseen that and they would have at least checked the ineligible applicants as opposed to just leaving them there,” Elgallad said. “It’s almost like pushing the blame on applicants where it’s almost out of our control.”
Since then, Elgallad has encountered a new problem afflicting unemployment applicants. He said he’s only received partial payments for the weeks he’s been approved, amounting to less than half of the total state and federal benefits Florida’s CONNECT system has told him he should be receiving — $2,156 so far instead of $4,375.
Rachel Webb, a guest relations employee furloughed and then laid off from Lexus of Melbourne, was also puzzled when she received a letter informing her she was ineligible for state benefits. Webb, 69, of Rockledge, was confused about why her application had been singled out, while her colleagues, whom she’d helped apply, were already getting checks. It turned out that her pay during the period DEO uses to determine eligibility had been too low.
She was one of 200,000 workers marked ineligible over one weekend in April, and only after reading a report in the Orlando Sentinel was she able to figure out how to apply for federal relief through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program she was eligible for. “It took me probably three days to complete my claim because of the horrific challenges of the system,” Webb said, estimating she tried to call DEO hundreds of times during the process. “And then to get that letter, and then that site not really saying anything, nothing telling you why.”
Finally, on May 11, she received her first $600 PUA check.According to DEO, 95 % of eligible claimants in Florida have been paid, while more than 207,337 are in the queue for processing as of Thursday. A total of 996,045 claimants have so far been paid a combined $2.7 billion, a figure that seems impressive, until it’s compared to other states.
Michigan, for instance, which has a population less than half the size of Florida’s, has paid out $5.6 billion in unemployment between state and federal dollars.
The figure also doesn’t capture that most payments so far, workers say, have been partial, and in Elgalland’s case, what he calls nonsensical. He is approved for Florida’s maximum payout of $275 a week, but he’s received as little as $185 for one of his weeks and has only been paid two weeks of the federal $600 weekly payment instead of the five weeks he’s been approved for. Elgalland, a blue-collar worker with a master’s degree, said he feels the state has assumed that workers have been irresponsible about their applications when it’s the system, he said, that is setting workers up for failure. He said the situation has been so frustrating, it led him for the first time to write to the governor and his representatives in Congress.
“If we paid our taxes for these and we’re Florida residents, we shouldn’t be treated like we are making someone’s job hard,” he said. “This is what they’re paid to do.”