As Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were making their way through Florida in September, rallying large crowds on promises to address unemployment, Florida employers were cutting 1,818 jobs from the workforce. This was in conjunction with the 1,415 job losses in August and 1,944 in July.
As of October, Florida’s 8.5 percent official unemployment rate is still significantly higher than the national average of 7.8 percent, despite being an improvement from 8.7 percent in September. For its upcoming fiscal year, Florida has cut 4,000 state jobs and reduced higher education and health care funds. The state has a 0 percent income tax on the state’s wealthiest citizens. These cuts are so deep that Palm Beach County Clerk and Comptroller Sharon Bock has stated that constituents in the area may sue.
In addition, Governor Rick Scott and the right-wing Florida legislature have been slashing away at vital unemployment benefits depended on by hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers, while at the same time affording new corporate tax breaks for the state’s most wealthy capitalists. This year, Florida passed new measures placing countless obstacles between unemployed workers and unemployment benefits. Florida currently has the lowest rate of beneficiaries to unemployed workers in the country, at only 16 percent. Only one in three unemployed workers receive any aid at all from the state, ranking Florida dead last nationally. This is in stark contrast to other states like Ohio, currently ranking number 40 in unemployment insurance beneficiaries, with 39 percent of the unemployed actually receiving benefits.
The parties of the rich will continue to work in unison to carry out the program of cuts that the big bankers and bosses want despite the ongoing job losses. Only a genuine fightback movement independent of these parties can win the benefits and jobs needed by working people.
