Unemployment in Florida | An Open Letter to Governor DeSantis

Welcome to the 2020 Florida Unemployment Fiasco!

Hi friends from near and far! After 45 days in Florida’s unemployment queue with no real updates, no reassurance and more questions than answers, we reached out directly to our governor with a personal note. At a recent press conference, he shared that the DEO was reaching out to applicants on social media, so we figured why not attempt to make contact in a new way. The state’s website and phone number are rarely functional, so let’s see if a more vocal approach helps. We’ll keep you posted here if/when I receive a response.

Got a disastrous unemployment tale of your own? Tell us in the comments – would love any officials who end up on this page to know that we are not alone.

• 5/8 UPDATE: I filed for reemployment assistance 48 days ago. It’s been 3 days since I emailed Governor DeSantis. No response. Unemployment status is still pending on the CONNECT site. No PUA link yet.
• 5/11 UPDATE: I filed for reemployment assistance 51 days ago. It’s been 5 days since I emailed Governor DeSantis and there has been no response. I’ve called his office as well but did not get through. Unemployment status is still pending on the CONNECT site. No PUA link yet.
• 5/12 UPDATE: I filed for reemployment assistance 52 days ago. It’s been 6 days since I emailed DeSantis. No response. Unemployment status is still pending on the CONNECT site. No PUA link. Just got this fun notice after trying to claim my re-employment weeks: “This requested week has been identified as your Waiting Week, and will therefore not be paid.” Waiting Week? I’ve been waiting since 3/22.
• 5/13 UPDATE: I filed for reemployment assistance 53 days ago. I emailed Governor DeSantis again yesterday. No response. Unemployment status is still pending on the CONNECT site. No PUA link.
• 5/14 UPDATE: I filed for reemployment 54 days ago. Good news: Denied again & got the PUA link! Bad news: I’ve input my info 5 times and keep getting kicked out before reaching the end. Time spent: 2 hours. No response from DeSantis.
• 5/15 UPDATE: I filed for reemployment 55 days ago. Trying to file via the PUA link. I input my info (takes about 15 minutes) and it gives me the same error message each time. Spent 3 hours yesterday and 1 so far today. No response from Governor DeSantis, who appeared on TV today saying 99% of eligible Floridians have been paid. That’s not even close to being true.
• 5/18 UPDATE: I filed for reemployment 58 days ago. I have been unable to submit proof of employment information on the website despite trying for hours each day. I’ve been deemed eligible pending adjudication determination. Which is…?
   
• 5/19 UPDATE: I filed for reemployment 59 days ago. Today I received 2 FPUC payments! Still no PUA but I’m more hopeful than I’ve been. I now join those who’ve been eligible all along awaiting backpay from March/April. Will we get it, Governor DeSantis?
• 5/29 UPDATE: I filed for reemployment 69 days ago. I’ve received 2 federal/2 state payments out of maybe 16 or so I’m eligible for. The @FLDEO site STILL won’t let me upload or call to verify my income, so I’m receiving less than what I qualify for.
  
•  6/8 UPDATE: I filed for assistance 79 days ago. I’ve received 4 of 22 payments I’m eligible for. I still can’t get through to FLDEO by phone. I just spent three hours trying to upload my proof of income and access documents sent to my inbox, and I got all the way to the end and the website kicked me out again. Meanwhile, the City of Jacksonvnille is distributing federal funds left and right to citizens and small businesses. Even WITH the occasional website issue, they’re still getting in done in record time. Why can’t the state do the same?
  
• 7/23 UPDATE: I filed for reemployment assistance 123 days/roughly 17 weeks ago. I’ve received 6 payments in that time. I can’t reach anyone at FLDEO. How is this STILL broken?

May 6, 2020

Dear Governor DeSantis,

I hope you and your family are well during this crisis. Casey interviewed me many times when she hosted The Chat, so congratulations to you both on the new baby.

I’m writing you as a self-employed member of Florida’s tourism industry. I’m a Gator grad with a public relations degree, and after a decade working in marketing in New York and Atlanta, I left the corporate world to carve out my career as a travel writer. Since then, my sister and I have formed multiple businesses together – we create content for destination marketing organizations, develop licensed video and photography and run an influencer marketing consultancy. We’re freelance journalists, TV hosts and contractors at Disney and Universal. My husband and I also own a vacation rental in Jacksonville. 

We have many diverse ways of making income but due to the circumstances of COVID-19, all of them are on life support. We don’t know if we’ll be able to continue working in tourism. We don’t know if the website we’ve spent 15 years building into one of the world’s top travel sites will recover. We just can’t be sure if the travel show we’ve been filming will outlast coronavirus. There is so much uncertainty.

What I do know is that we’ve worked very hard, paid taxes and advocated for our home state as a tourism destination for more than 20 years, and we never miss a chance to vote.

The current unemployment system was already a disaster, and you inherited a broken site. But as a website publisher myself, I can tell you from experience that no matter how complicated a website, it wouldn’t take this long to repair if you’d started from scratch. How it cost tens (if not hundreds) of millions of taxpayer dollars is a question that voters would like to see answered by an independent investigation.

 
The blame for the broken system may not be wholly yours, but it’s certainly not on us. To suggest, as you recently did at a press conference, that hundreds of thousands of Floridians didn’t enter our security numbers or employment information correctly is an insult. The Floridians in need today are business owners, working parents, entertainers, hustlers. We help drive the economy! We are not incompetent leeches intent on draining the system and never working again. You might be surprised, but small business owners and self employed entrepreneurs are pretty savvy at filling out simple forms with our own personal information. We’d love nothing more than to save our livelihoods right now.

After several days of trying, my application was finally completed on the dysfunctional CONNECT site on March 22 — 45 days ago. I was prompted again and again to claim weeks and provide work search history though the requirements were waived. Eventually I was deemed ineligible last week with no explanation and learned, not from the DEO, but via social media to reapply on the same system with nearly identical forms a few days later. There’s been no update since. There’s no indication how to apply for PUA made available by the CARES Act. If given the opportunity, I’m able to provide years of tax returns, check stubs and verification that I work as hard as anyone else and am eligible according to the law for this assistance.

The system is failing us. When I call the DEO phone number, I reach a recording that directs me back to the website, which directs me to call the same number that doesn’t work. It’s a breadline to nowhere. Even now after all the promised fixes and updated server capacity, the site might eventually load after you enter all your information half a dozen times. Usually there’s an hour’s worth of data entry only to have it kick back to the first page. Did it work? Did the information submit correctly? Is help on the way? No one knows!

If it’s true as you say that the DEO is reaching out to the most vocal individuals on social media, then that’s a disgraceful, inefficient way of fixing this problem. Applying for assistance according to the guidelines we’ve been given should be enough.

Forcing panicked Floridians to beg for government attention on social media is a humiliating additional step that should not be a part of the already demoralizing process of losing our jobs.

Furthermore, I’ve been actively reporting on this fiasco across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for 7 weeks and I haven’t received a reply from you, the DEO or any other official. If I’m not receiving responses from my verified accounts, what chance do others have to reach your desk?

It’s widely known now that the taxpayer-funded unemployment system was designed to make applying difficult and to keep the unemployment numbers low. What’s less obvious at first glance is how significant those statistics are for real people. When Florida reaches a certain percentage of unemployment, benefits increase for all those eligible. For every half percentage point unemployment increases after that critical point, eligible constituents receive additional weeks of payments. Unemployment is at an all time high across the nation, except in Florida where the numbers tell a different story. How very peculiar that the DEO is consistently marking applicants ineligible with no explanation, no recourse and no way to appeal. The numbers almost certainly appear lower than they are.