Jobless figures soar in Florida
Unemployment in metro Orlando jumps to 22.6%, state at 14.5%
Unemployment in metro Orlando rose to 22.6% in May and 14.5% statewide, dashing hopes that jobless numbers would go down as businesses began to reopen and some people returned to work amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The unemployment rate in the Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford area, home to theme park giants and countless attractions and hotels that for months have been closed to tourists, was the highest in the state, according to numbers released Friday by the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity. It rivals joblessness during the worst times of the Great Depression when unemployment was 24.9%.
Orlando was the only metropolitan area in the state that saw more jobs lost since April, when the area’s unemployment hit 16.2%. In all, the region lost 57,200 jobs in that time.
It’s a significant jump from 13.8% state unemployment in April, which was revised from the previously reported 12.9%. Some had hoped that would be the peak of joblessness during the virus out
break.
Before all this, Florida had long enjoyed recordlow unemployment. As recently as February, state unemployment was at an alltime low of 2.8%.
National unemployment was 13.3% in May, suggesting that a good chunk of Americans were slowly returning to work. However, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics later said a data collection error that misclassified some workers had resulted in the rosier jobs report and that national unemployment in May was likely about 16.3%.
DEO officials said, “The evidence suggests that some states, including Florida, were impacted more than others,” implying unemployment in Florida could be worse than numbers are indicating.
Rates in counties across Central Florida, which heavily relies on tourists to power its economy, show the deep impact of the coronavirus pandemic and government closures imposed to stop its spread. Osceola County had the highest unemployment rate among counties in the state at 31.1%. DEO officials were unsure if a rate so high had ever been recorded previously.
It was followed by Orange County at 23.2% and Lake County at 20.6%.
“I think we knew even back in February and March as shutdowns were starting, we knew Orlando was going to be hard it, being the number one tourist destination in the world,” said Phoebe Fleming, director of research for the Orlando Economic Partnership.
The Orlando area has been hit hardest because damage to the leisure and hospitality industry has been particularly brutal as people have stopped traveling and tried to avoid large crowds, Fleming said, and the majority of theme park workers live in Orange and Osceola counties. Since last year, the industry has lost 460,500 jobs statewide, about 36.8% of its workforce.
However, from April to May, as many counties and cities eased off stay-at-home orders and mandates shuttering non-essential businesses, 62,900 tourism jobs were recovered.
In June, workers began returning to jobs at Universal Orlando, SeaWorld and Disney Springs as those parks reopened at limited capacities, and more will go back to their jobs when Disney World reopens in July. The parks’ closures had resulted in furloughs of tens of thousands of workers.
The pandemic has in part made clearer the fragility of a local economy that depends on tourism and focuses on cultivating lowwage jobs.
Fleming said she hopes the fallout from the pandemic will accelerate action to help workers learn new skills and for the Central Florida region to rethink how to develop more jobs that pay higher wages.
“Wages at all levels are a reality in our economy. However, creating pathways to middle-wage jobs helps both our communities and economy,” Fleming said.
Across the four counties that make up Central Florida, 280,000 people work in tourism, accounting for the biggest portion of the local labor force, the Orlando Sentinel reported in its Laborland series last year that delved into how low wages, scarce affordable housing and insufficient public transit have hurt theme park workers especially.
Orlando hit hard
May’s bleak unemployment numbers prompted the DEO, the state agency that has been struggling to process unemployment claims from the millions of Floridians who have been furloughed or laid off during the pandemic, to host its first online news conference discussing the report.
“It’s very apparent that leisure and hospitality is an area that is continuing to either see job losses or not gain them back quite as quickly,” said Adrienne Johnston, bureau chief for workforce statistics and economic research at DEO. “With the Orlando metro area, there’s a high concentration of those types of jobs in that area, so they’re impacted more than other areas in the state.”
Other industries — including construction and manufacturing; education and health services; retail trade and transportation; and professional and business services — are appearing to recover, although slowly.
The information industry, which includes publishing and broadcasting, lost another 100 jobs, as news outlets furloughed journalists as advertisers pulled out.
The numbers show that although unemployment claims in Florida and throughout the country have slowed over the past few weeks, millions of people are still out of work.
The U.S. Department of Labor reported on Thursday that for the week ending June 12, 86,298 applications for unemployment were submitted from Floridians seeking benefits for the first time — down from the number of claims submitted in weeks prior, including the last week of May when 207,707 were filed.
Slow to help
Since the coronavirus broke out in the United States, sparking furloughs and layoffs across the country, Florida’s broken unemployment system has been slow to process applications and riddled with problems that have prevented countless people from collecting any assistance.
The state in 2011 under Republican Gov. Rick Scott also made drastic cuts to the unemployment program, excluding many workers from qualifying for state aid, shrinking weekly payments to at most $275 and limiting the number of weeks folks can collect benefits to just 12.
As of Thursday, DEO has received claims from 2,044,116 people and paid 1,448,420. It says, however, that it’s paid 97.9% of eligible claimants. Almost 200,000 people are still waiting to have their applications verified.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has ordered a state investigation of the CONNECT unemployment system, calling the $77 million system the state purchased in 2010 from Deloitte Consulting a waste of taxpayer money. Two top-ranking U.S. senators have also called for a federal investigation by the Department of Labor into Florida’s “uniquely poor” handling of unemployment during the health crisis.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, and Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee from Oregon, blamed “inaction” from DeSantis and Scott to address “persistent, critical flaws with the state’s unemployment systems” that have been pointed out numerous times in multiple audits.