Unemployment During The Pandemic
April 8, 2020, a few hundred people in Florida broke the state's Stay at home to wait in a line. Hundreds of thousands of people had lost their jobs and applied for unemployment benefits through Florida's online system. However, the people in this had come out to get paper applications. Because for thousands in Florida, the website isn't working "problems from almost the moment it went online" plagued with site crashes and glitches. The process of filing is nearly impossible. Americans have lost their job all over the country. However, the hope they can get depends on what state they lived in. That's because the U.S system doesn't have one unemployment system. It has 53 of them. Each state and territory has its own, and the differences between them are vast. In places like New Jersey and Massachusetts before the economy crashed. A little more than all workers without jobs were collecting unemployment benefits. In Florida, less than 10% of unemployed people were getting them. In places like Florida, the complicated, hard to use the unemployment system isn't a mistake. It's exactly what It was designed to do. There are not any real answers from the agencies. People have been calling on the phone, emailed, May went by so fast, and June 1 is already has passed. There hasn't been any idea of what there is to do
Back during the Great Recession, lots of people were out of work. State unemployment systems were in overdrive. In many states, the funds that fed those systems were running out of cash, so many states, Including Florida, raised taxes on businesses. That made lots of business owners unhappy. In the 2010 and 2012 elections, several states elected Republican governors who promised to reverse those tax hikes. The Phrase "Any tax increase kills jobs" in 2011 when Rick Scott took office. Florida employers paid $319 per worker in unemployment taxes. By 2019 when he left, they were paying $50 per worker. T
The lowest rate in the country. However, that meant Florida's system was underfunded again. So the new Governor and the Republican legislature started finding ways to pay less money to fewer people. They cut weekly payments and reduced the number of weeks you could collect unemployment if you were laid off. However, they also redesign the system itself. In 2011, Florida Governor Rick Scott signed a few that moved the state's entire unemployment application process online. The new system was notoriously tricky to use. No money, and no answers because of problems with the state's new $63 million unemployment website. In 2019, Florida's state auditor released a report on the state's unemployment system. It noted that it frequently gave incorrect error messages and would often prevent applying entirely.
