Florida’s miserly unemployment compensation benefits, served up on a website that doesn’t work, has been a huge boil on our body politic for far too long. The coronavirus has at last made it impossible to ignore.
For the poorly compensated people who perform the myriad mundane chores that make life possible for so many of the rest of us, the damage inflicted by the coronavirus cataclysm is — literally — incalculable.
We can’t calculate the exact numbers of workers affected thanks to the absurdly named Department of Economic Opportunity and its absurdly named website, CONNECT. Tens of thousands of laid-off Floridians have tried, for hours at a time and days on end, to CONNECT to this low-rent website.
CONNECT was foisted upon us by then-Gov. Rick Scott at a cost of $77 million, including a $14 million cost overrun. In a process that passes for competitive bidding in Florida, the contract to design and build the system went to Deloitte Consulting. The company’s star lobbyist was Brian Ballard, the co-chair of Scott’s inaugural finance committee.
STATS SUPPRESSED
From the beginning, ghosts in the machine locked thousands of unemployed workers out of the system and delayed desperately needed payments — for weeks. An unnamed adviser to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, interviewed by Politico, alleges that Scott deliberately sought to install a system so cumbersome that it would discourage unemployed Floridians from seeking funds.
It was a great way to keep Florida’s unemployment stats down, Scott’s intent. It was a reprehensible way, however, for the state’s top public servant to treat people who had a right to the funds in order to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads.
Year after year, state auditors documented the disconnects — pun definitely intended — in the website. The audits gathered dust on the desks of a succession of DEO agency heads including Jesse Pannucio and Cissy Proctor, who have gone on to bigger and better-paying things, leaving this creaky, constipated mess behind for Gov. DeSantis, Scott’s successor and sparring partner in the daily battle for President Donald Trump’s favor and airtime on cable news.
DeSantis did nothing to address the collapsing computers at DEO, and why would he? Florida’s dishwashers, dog walkers, day laborers and Disney cast members are too strapped to pay for lobbyists and too busy scraping by to vote.
BENEFITS TOO LOW
Then, too, there’s the matter of HB 7005, an odious piece of legislation that Scott enthusiastically signed into law in 2011. The bill capped unemployment benefits at $275 a week and reduced the duration of benefits from 26 weeks to a maximum of 12. According to FileUnemployment.org, Florida is almost at the bottom nationally in what it pays for unemployment insurance compensation. Only Alabama, Louisiana, Arizona and Mississippi pay less.
HB 7005 also imposed new and humiliating state scrutiny on an applicant’s efforts to find employment. Under Scott’s scheme, unemployed Floridians seeking benefits are required to prove that they are looking for a job to the satisfaction of a DEO equivalent of probation officers and helicopter parents.
It was, and remains, a high-handed, mean-spirited insult to working adults in need of a job, not a job-search nanny. And Scott was still at it late last month. Florida’s junior U.S. senator balked at the stimulus bill’s $600 per week increase in unemployment benefits, on top of state benefits. He actually, and arrogantly, believes that so much largess would tempt low-wage earners not to hunt for jobs after the COVID-19 crisis ends. Scott, who has flaunted his poverty-stricken upbringing in public housing, has resolutely eliminated empathy from his vocabulary.
Florida Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez, who was serving in the state House in 2011, voted for the bill capping benefits. Ebenezer Scrooge would have liked it, too.
JUST FIX IT
There’s a push for DEO Secretary Ken Lawson to resign, but that would be too easy. Plus, doesn’t the buck stop a little higher up the ladder? Lawson is on an “I accept responsibility” tour, putting in long hours making excuses, making apologies, pleading for patience and soliciting online applications for additional workers to help out at the CONNECT helpline. Let’s hope that website works better than CONNECT.
On Thursday, DeSantis issued an order suspending rent evictions and foreclosures for 45 days, a move we can applaud. We’ve also noted here that DeSantis made a decent start by eliminating the requirement that people seeking unemployment benefits must actively be looking for a job. Since then, he has temporarily suspended a requirement that workers wait a week before they can collect their first unemployment check.
But that won’t buy groceries or pay rent for Florida’s newly unemployed. It isn’t just the paltry state benefits at risk; recent federal legislation aimed at helping the gig workers, euphemistically referred to as independent contractors, are also required to register with CONNECT.
“We’re all in this together” rings hollow from the lips of lawmakers with a well documented history of abuse, neglect and disrespect for the millions of low-wage workers upon whose backs Florida’s economy is built. The vast majority of men and women trying to CONNECT have worked hard, holding their heads high — but barely above water. They have earned the dignity of a simple and respectful unemployment claims system.
Florida’s public schools have produced tech wizards like Jeff Bezos and Sheryl Sandberg. Surely the governor can insist that the DEO find someone, somewhere, to design a website that works. But given DeSantis’ sluggish handling of the coronavirus crisis so far, the question remains: Will he?
———
©2020 Miami Herald
Visit Miami Herald at www.miamiherald.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.