Drew Dixon
The pace of new unemployment claims during the coronavirus outbreak in Florida appears to have at least leveled off for the second week in a row, according to figures released this week by the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity.
There were 2.73 million total claims for unemployment benefits in Florida this week since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak on March 15. That’s up by about 100,000 filings from last week, which was also up by about the same amount of people seeking assistance due to the impacts of the pandemic.
Last week showed the first real slow down in unemployment claims in Florida during the COVID-19 crisis, which earlier in June was increasing by at least 400,000 new claims on a weekly basis.
Out of total claims filed, state officials say 2.53 million of them are confirmed unique claims, which means they weren’t duplicates.
Meanwhile, there were about 2.36 million claims that have been processed, which is about 93.5% of the unique claims submitted to the state. The percentage of processed claims is slightly lower than last week when that figure was 95.6%.
The number of Floridians eligible for state or federal unemployment increased to 1.59 million people. That’s up from last week’s figure of 1.27 million, a jump of more than 300,000 people. About 1.26 million of those people are eligible for state reemployment assistance, 281,950 are eligible for federal pandemic unemployment assistance and 47,790 are eligible for federal pandemic emergency unemployment compensation. About 484,000 Floridians are not eligible for state or federal reemployment assistance.
About 1.58 million claimants have been paid pandemic assistance benefits so far in Florida, that’s about 99.4% of eligible claimants.
The amount of federal and state funds used to help Floridians economically impacted by coronavirus increased to a total of $8.19 billion in the past week, up from $7.14 billion the week before.
That figure is largely paid by federal dollars. Florida has allocated $1.97 billion to the unemployment relief. About $5.94 billion has been picked up by federal money for pandemic unemployment compensation. Another $231.36 million of federal money has been allocated to unemployment pandemic assistance and $48.21 million in federal dollars has been spent on pandemic emergency unemployment compensation.
2 comments
TED KRUZE
June 30, 2020 at 11:29 am
Regular working people in Florida are screwed. The Florida unemployment compensation system is among the worst in the nation in terms of qualifying and benefits paid. $200 per week for 12 weeks isn’t going to do any substantial good for anybody – and going back to a $10.00 per hour job – or finding a new one at $9.00 per hour – is of no real benefit, either. Florida workers – mostly low-paid service workers – should consider getting the hell outta here. For these workers, this state hadn’t yet fully recovered from the Great Bush Recession before this pandemic – and now, it’s just gotten much worse. The states in Jesusland – and their workers and small businesses – are up a creek without a paddle.
Sonja Fitch
July 1, 2020 at 2:54 pm
Duffus Desantis does not give a rats ass about the unemployment situation ! Just like the goptrump cult sociopath racist sexist liar leader trump, duffus Desantis has given up!
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