It’s been about five months since COVID-19 forced many businesses to close their doors and put millions of Floridians out of work. To this day, thousands say they have yet to receive all of their unemployment benefits owed to them, many of them citing missing back payments.
Many unemployed Floridians couldn’t submit their unemployment applications until mid-April, as the Department of Economic Opportunity’s system just couldn’t handle the volume of applicants the pandemic brought.
That doesn’t change that they were unemployed for a month prior.
“You feel like you’re kind of being abandoned by the system,” said Alexandra Munera, a former tour guide who is waiting on 6 weeks of back payments. “I’m scared.”
“It shouldn’t be this hard,” said Vanessa Brgara, who works in marketing for nonprofits.
Both Munera and Brgara lost their jobs in March and couldn’t submit their applications until April. They are each missing more than $3 thousand.
“It’s sad because we all are in a hard moment,” Munera said.
The women have tried every outlet they can think of to get their claims backdated. They’ve sent hundreds of emails to DEO agents, they sit on DEO’s hotline for hours and they’ve spoken with elected officials to escalate their claims. Nothing has worked.
FCN asked DEO what steps these claimants should take as the call center has continuously failed them, DEO did not answer the question.
“They say that the system is fine,” Munera said. “It’s not fine.”
These women say they’ve paid into this system their whole career, and they won’t stop trying until the money is in their pocket.
“We have a lot more work to do,” Brgara said. “A lot.”