Peter Scorsch talks with Sen. Jason Pizzo, as the South Florida Senator spends his quarantine hunkered down in Tallahassee, waging a battle against the broken unemployment system.
In this important episode, Pizzo says he's "a little tired and very angry" after weeks of emails, calls and Facebook messages from Floridians in need, whose frustration is turning to desperation. Thousands of applications have sat in limbo for months. It's not about the blame game at this point, Pizzo says, it's about an executive function that isn't functioning.
Through the initial weeks of the pandemic, Pizzo volunteered to work through claims manually, to work in the mail room, or to help in any other way possible to get the system functioning. Pizzo suggested that the 160 legislators, along with each of their 2-3 staff people, process claims each day. He says his offer was declined by Department of Economic Opportunity Executive Director Ken Lawson. He says it was declined again by Department of Management Services Secretary Jonathan Satter when he took over the unemployment system.
At this point, Pizzo says the unemployment system is the "definiton of insanity." It's so fundamentally broken, he says, that Florida taxpayers are wasting money to support 72 extra servers and 2000 call center employees, because the employees have no ability to help. In fact, Pizzo received a tip from a call center employee that the "submit" button in their system was not available, and therefore they could not fix any claims.
Pizzo says one major problem is the lack of coordination between government and the businesses that have laid off their employees. As of last count, Pizzo explains, 138,000 people were waiting just for employer wage verification, even as thousands of those claim came from large employers like Disney.
The most frustrating component of this systemic failure, Pizzo says, is the way Gov. Ron DeSantis has spoken about it. In one press conference, he told Floridians, that if they filed their unemployment claim in March and haven’t got paid yet, either the filer made a mistake or they’re not eligible. Pizzo took six stories of unemployed women who did not get unemployment assistance directly to the governor and while not all claims have been processed, but six of the 10 have all qualified for unemployment.
And these failures will have dire consequences for Floridians, Pizzo explains. Default car loans, evictions and the future consequences of plummeting credit scores will haunt Florida for years.
Finally, Peter and Pizzo discuss the political implications of this failure and what it could mean for upcoming Florida elections. Special Guest: Jason Pizzo.