Coronavirus Florida: Editorial: Mounting protests by the state’s frustrated jobless are well-founded

Driven by frustration, anger, and, in many cases, sheer desperation, Floridians are taking to the streets in cities across the state to demand action to fix an inept and insulting unemployment benefits system.

In the midst of a viral pandemic that is far from abating, we will not advocate that people stand physically shoulder-to-shoulder to shout their frustrations. But all Floridians should stand in spirit with the many thousands of hardworking residents whose jobs vanished months ago in the public-health emergency, yet even now are forced to coax from state government the small stipends they ever more urgently need.

By now, the litany of vexations is well known: the jammed phone lines, the hours on hold, the online system that balks and crashes, the inexplicable responses to re-file and then re-file again. All for a meager $275 a week — Florida’s maximum jobless allowance, one of the lowest in the nation. And for many recipients, not a dime of the additional $600 federal supplement to which they’re entitled.

Last Sunday, The Post Editorial Board published a long string of letters that we received after asking readers to send us their unemployment-benefit nightmare stories. They made for depressing reading. “I was furloughed on March 12. I have been trying to get through to DEO ever since,” said Jocelyne Dunn of West Palm Beach, all too typically. She was referring to the mockingly named Florida Department of Economic Opportunity.

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Instead of grabbing the problems by the throat and demanding an overhaul, Gov. Ron DeSantis has denied, deflected and blamed. He has infamously contended that “99.9%” of unemployment claims have been paid. That’s about 99.9% inaccurate.

In fact, Floridians have filed 1.9 million unemployment claims since the coronavirus business shutdown began in March, but only about 1.3 million people have begun receiving payments, according to the DEO. The situation is so bad that this counts as progress; during the first month of the crisis, Florida was the slowest state in the nation to process claims.

“While all states have seen record increases in the number of its residents applying for unemployment, the state of Florida’s performance has proved uniquely poor in its abject inability to assist millions of Florida residents…”

Well said. The quote is from a letter sent Monday by two out-of-state senators, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, of New York, and Ron Wyden, of Oregon. They asked the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate Florida’s failure to process and pay out unemployment claims.

DeSantis promptly shot down the Democrats’ call for a federal review as “partisan,” echoing the GOP-led Florida Legislature, which has rebuffed calls from state and federal Democrats for a special session to overhaul the system and raise the low cap on payments.

Fine, their criticisms are partisan. You know what else is partisan? The reason that Florida’s system is so terrible in the first place. Gov. Rick Scott pushed to create the so-called CONNECT system in 2013, slashing benefits and shortening the number of weeks of eligibility. The goal was to make things easier on businesses — grinding down workers in the process. This is the worst sort of partisanship, the kind that uses the instruments of government to coddle campaign contributors over improving the lives of ordinary citizens.

Scott, now a U.S. senator, is still at it, repeatedly expressing the condescending worry that if the government pays out to help struggling Americans make it through the pandemic-caused economic crisis, they’ll be too content to collect a $600 subsidy to go back to work.

The insult is not going unnoticed. “I really feel like they did a disservice by describing us, who have become unemployed through no fault of their own, as lazy,” Bonnie Armstrong, a laid-off restaurant server, told The Post’s Wendy Rhodes. “I’m a Republican. I voted for DeSantis. I’ve never filed for unemployment in my life.”

Armstrong founded a group called Florida Workers — Fight for your UE Benefits! It’s one of a spate of groups erupting across the state in reaction to the unemployment fiasco: Fix It Florida; Action Group for COVID-19 Unemployment; Florida Unemployment Weekly Virtual Protest. They and others have been protesting on social media — and in recent days made their demands in person in Tallahassee, Tampa, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale.

They’ll have to make a lot more noise to get DeSantis and the other hard-of-hearing Republicans who lead this state to act with the urgency this crisis demands.

And to fundamentally change Florida’s miserly benefits system, it will take more than noise.

This debacle “is really making me think hard how I’m going to vote in the next election, I’ll say that,” says Armstrong, the Republican voter-turned-activist.

Every one of the 1.9 million Floridians who, like her, have suffered unnecessarily because of state government’s ineptitude and callousness should think just as hard when next they vote.