To the editor:

Congratulations to the 14,000 graduates honored in the Cape Coral Breeze last week and their parents. Best wishes on winning one of the five job listings in the paper offering five jobs that same week. Maybe tell Dad he won’t be getting you off the couch just yet on Father’s Day.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has now refused to distribute Federal jobless benefits for the unemployed. Since any waiter who might make $30. a month in tips can be paid $2.13 per hour, DeSantis believes cutting back on benefits will coerce jobs to exist. The AFL-CIO reports that 80% of currently unemployed workers are gig economy or others who have no recourse to state unemployment benefits now. State resources are not now being paid to them. But this ill-advised decision from Gov. DeSantis will keep much-needed revenue out of our state. His decision will most punish the mom-and-pop local retailer that can sell only to locals who have money to buy food or pay the light bill. These local businesses and landlords will feel this unnecessary pinch.

In the world of temporary foreign visa applications, a local worker scarcity is the pretext for employers need to file for bonded foreign temporary workers who can be deported if they complain. So it is no wonder that we have been hearing a clamor in the visa season from the hiring class that jobs are vacant. But is there a job for everyone? The over-50, the not-white, those blighted by prejudices that perhaps subliminally affect hiring decisions, are disproportionately still unemployed in the current uneven employment of Florida’s demographic.

The claim that domestic locals can’t be hired is the more suspicious coming at the end of the tourist season, No tourists, fewer tourist-related jobs. Unemployment jumps in Florida’s tourist trade during the summer. Hurricane season has never seen tourists flocking to our state. The Bureau of Labor Statistics for the last 10 years shows Florida is suffering the normal average summer monthly unemployment rate for 2021 (excluding last year’s 14% unemployment as an outlier).

Gov. DeSantis’ decision to end the $800 million federal dollars pumped into Florida’s economy, with the lofty goal of punishing the unemployed, will badly affect the local economy of the state. Eschewing federal aid will not create an increase in tourists, the absence of whom is the cause for lay-offs in the industry that claims jobs are going vacant for want of willing labor.

To end legal benefits to the few who qualify under Florida law is simple. You offer a real job. Not a sign in the window, not a try out for the team, not an application, not a jobs fair; a job. A show up at 8 on Monday j-o-b. The worker that refuses a job is ineligible to collect benefits.

Period.

To refuse the $800 million that was stimulating the Florida local economy via the multiplier effect will simply be a cruel loss to the marginalized gig workers, and a grave loss to the local economy with no upside. DeSantis should reverse his position.

Ellen Starbird

Cape Coral