State to stop federal unemployment benefits
This Saturday, out-ofwork Floridians will no longer be able to collect federal unemployment checks, after Gov. Ron DeSantis decided to cut off the benefits early in an effort to help businesses start hiring again.
Florida is one of 26 states, most of which are led by Republican governors, that opted to stop participating in the federal unemployment program months ahead of its Sept. 6 expiration date.
For Floridians who manage to get through the Department of Economic Opportunity’s CONNECT website, that means the most they’ll be able to collect is $275 per week in state benefits, which equates to about $6.87 per hour and is among the lowest payouts in the country. Recently, DeSantis also reinstated the requirement for people to apply to five jobs per week to stay on unemployment, as well as severing ties with the remaining call centers that had been fielding calls from claimants.
“We reinstituted the job search requirement and now discontinued the added federal money, and the reason is simple: we’ve got almost a half a million job openings in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said last month at a news conference in Miami.
In total, The Century Foundation, a progressive, independent think tank that researches public policy, says that 116,304 Floridians will lose out on the additional benefits and the state will sacrifice over $418 million in federal funding that would otherwise be spent on the local economy. Just last week, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that Florida had received
6,792 new unemployment claims, and countless applicants say they are still owed money because of problems with the CONNECT system.
But so far, DeSantis hasn’t backed down.
Business industry groups such as the Florida Chamber of Commerce, Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association, Florida Retail Federation and Associated Industries of Florida all supported the decision, arguing that giving laidoff workers higher benefits was discouraging them from returning to work. However, labor groups that represent Florida’s tourism and service industry workforce have called that a “disproven talking point” and said some workers have decided not to return to jobs that pay low wages and don’t offer benefits.
“We are being told we are having a hiring crisis because people would rather stay home making less than minimum wage. And that is just not true,” Rich Templin, director of politics and public policy with the Florida AFL-CIO, a federation of labor unions across the state, said during a Zoom news conference on Thursday.
Templin pointed to the strict eligibility rules that were put in place back in 2011 and persistent technical glitches with CONNECT that kept many Floridians who lost jobs to the pandemic from ever collecting state benefits. For instance, many parttime, self-employed and contracted workers, as well as gig employees working for companies like Uber and
DoorDash, did not qualify for the state’s programs and solely relied on the federal programs Congress set up after the pandemic began, which at first provided $600 weekly payments. Those eligibility rules were put in place under Gov. Rick Scott at the behest of industry lobbyists looking to lower unemployment taxes for corporations.
“First, we have to remind everyone, most workers who found themselves without a job in the tumultuous past 14 months never saw a dime in state benefits. Period. Second, of those Floridians who did qualify for any benefits at all, only a fraction received our paltry weekly maximum benefit amount of $275,” Templin said, citing previous studies from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that’s found only 10% of unemployed Floridians usually receive unemployment checks from the state.
On Thursday, Florida AFL-CIO delivered a petition to the governor’s office urging him to reverse course. So far, it’s collected about 7,000 signatures online.
“Participation in this program costs the state of Florida nothing and in fact generates hundreds of millions of dollars that are spent at local businesses,” the petition reads. “Ending the program in our state simply kicks people when they are down to score political points with well-connected employers who want to continue paying poverty wages with no benefits,”
Templin said the group is also exploring the possibility of suing DeSantis to block his decision to withdraw from the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program, known as FPUC, that provides the $300 payments.