Wendi Walsh leads
Unite Here Local 355,
representing more than 7,000
hotel and hospitality workers.
I wanted to hear her
thoughts on the drive to reopen.
First and foremost, we think you
cannot separate the reopening
from the fiasco that is the
unemployment in Florida right
now, because what
really should be happening,
is that these employees should
be making an informed choice
about whether or not
it's safe to go back,
whether or not they are
healthy enough to go back.
Some of them are
caring for their children,
their parents, some have
preexisting health concerns that
are going to put them at risk,
but that given the fact that an
overwhelming majority of out of
work employees right now haven't
been able to access the
unemployment benefits that are
due to them, a lot of employees
are going to make a very bad
choice for themselves, and put
themselves in harm's way going
back into some of
these work places,
whether the employers are taking
the precautions that are needed
or not.
So, I think that
has to come first.
In terms of the
safety of the workers,
first if you want workers to
stay home when they are sick,
you need to pay them.
Too many places don't
have paid sick days.
If you're going to take
the temperature of a worker,
which we would support, and
they have a high temperature,
it does mean they
have Coronavirus,
but if you want to take the
precaution and send them home,
you have to send that
worker home with pay.
You can't ask people to continue
to go without a paycheck,
when you have no evidence
that they're really sick.
They need the
proper PPE, obviously,
they need a choice about whether
or not to go back to work right
now, depending on
their own health,
and if they don't
go back to work,
they should be able to stay
on unemployment benefits.
First they have to get
unemployment benefits,
but they have to be
able to keep them.
And we have to think about
what it looks like in the back,
and not just for the
guests in the front.
Well, you've talked about the
fact that these workers are
actually making a choice between
their own health's safety,
and whether or not they can
put food on their tables.
That's what you're talking
about when you're saying that,
you know, without a real
unemployment system being in
full effect, the workers are
given too very bad
choices in some cases.
100%, and at this point
they either stay home,
can't feed their family, can't
buy the prescription drugs that
they need, can't pay their rent,
or they are forced back to work.
In a situation, I just got off
the phone minutes ago with a
worker in Fort Lauderdale, who
didn't get a mask yesterday.
The company has masks,
they were locked in a room,
the person who has the key
to the room wasn't there,
and so everybody worked
yesterday without a mask.
That, that is the kind of
situation where workers should
be able to say, we're
just not coming in.
We're not going to put ourselves
at risk and then go home and put
our families at risk
of being infected,
because the employer
is being irresponsible.
Is the state's unemployment
system getting better,
as Governor Ron DeSantis claims?
I put that
question to Jason Pizzo,
the Democratic State
Senator for Miami,
who has been pushing the
Governor and his staff for
solutions to fix
this broken system.
From April 15th on,
things were getting better,
so to speak, or they
were staring to pick up,
and for the next week,
just on a stand-alone basis,
it was actually performing
okay, and last weekend,
two weekends ago they did
177,000 payment processes,
which was decent, but
this past weekend was anemic.
And this past few days, there's
only been a few thousand.
And so the system that we know
doesn't work and the website
doesn't work, and there's been
plenty of coverage about the
$77 million spent to create
this, what the Governor
calls a "jalopy."
Do you believe $275 is a fair
compensation for unemployment?
Absolutely not.
So, what do we do about that?
If it's not fair, and
I think by in large,
I don't know many people
who think it would be fair.
What changes, how does that
change going forward
in the future?
It is a lot of influence from
corporations in Florida and
Florida's tax payers as well.
I think this is probably the
prime time window to get by in,
even from the
company's whose employees.
Look, Disney laid off 43,000, I
think the real number's going to
be higher, like 70,000
total, and I think this is the
opportunity for
corporate buy in and lobbyists,
and Republicans and Democrats
to take a hard look at it,
and say listen, we
don't anticipate,
nor would we ever invite
this situation ever again,
but just in the interest,
just as a cautionary tale in the
future, we need to take more and
have the amount that goes out
that's bigger.
Jim, our trust fund has
a lot of money in it.
One of the first questions I
asked Sater when we went live,
was I wanted to
spell any rumors.
Is the state gonna go bankrupt
if you pay out everybody
that's eligible?
And the answer was no.
We have the money.
The float, the interest off
of the money we have has been
earning millions over
the past few months,
because we haven't been
paying out that much,
so there's plenty
of money to go out,
but $275 standing alone, Jim,
when the average rent in places
with markets like
Miami, and Jacksonville,
and Tampa, is woefully low.
Do you think there's a
deliberate effort to create
a faulty system for
unemployment benefits,
to discourage
people from applying,
to keep the number of
unemployment rate in the state
at a low level, because
you're not reporting,
or you're dropping off the
unemployment rolls
fairly quickly.
Do you think this wasn't
just, you know ignorance,
this is was deliberately done to
give a false impression of what
was going on in Florida by
previous administrations,
going back to Rick Scott
and others before him?
Absolutely.
I think there is this sort
of disdain for the culture
of welfare.
I think it's rather bizarre, and
sort of an emotional point for
Rick Scott, and i's evidenced
itself by how difficult it is to
navigate this process.
I think the guy should
be ashamed of himself.
I think he's made
it so difficult,
even for the learned, and the
overeducated to navigate this
process and try to find
some sort of clarity,
that for the large number of
Floridians trying to navigate
through this, I think is
intentionally difficult.
And a couple of cases that I
gave the Governor's office
yesterday, were minor
little technical issues.
One, who had been a straight
employee for a number of years
at one company, 34
years living in Florida,
never left, never applied,
never went anywhere else,
was held up
because the answer was,
or the excuse given was, well,
you know there's sometimes when
a social security
number comes into question,
because it may have been
used or fraud or whatever,
and there's no evidence
that it was the case,
they just put a watch on it,
so these arbitrary metrics,
these arbitrary situations
that can hold things up,
but if you can't get somebody
on the phone to walk through it,
Jim, let me put it this way.
If a state senator didn't
plant himself in Tallahassee,
and walked that woman's name
on a piece of paper over to the
Governor's office, she
would not have gotten a dollar.
And so if you ask me
if it's deliberate,
I think it's unnecessarily
complicated and I think it's
rather strange at this point.