Cerabino: Florida's unemployed need a champion, not coupon-cutting advice from Rick Scott

Or to put it another way, only 53 percent of all Florida households aren't in real economic peril. And that was before COVID-19.

The numbers of these working-poor households in Florida grew 14 percent from 2010 to to 2016, the United Way reported.

So, the great economic success of Florida appears to be predicated on getting a third of its workers to toil for less than a living wage. That's nothing to brag about.

"Florida has had a boon in job creation between 2010 and 2016, with the number of jobs rising from 7.1 million to 8.2 million," according to the United Way report from 2018. "Yet more than two thirds of jobs in Florida (67 percent) pay less than $20 per hour, with 72 percent of those jobs paying less than $15 per hour.

"A full-time job that pays $15 per hour grosses $30,000 per year, which is just over half of the Household Survival Budget for a family of four in Florida," the report said. "Moreover, job gains were greatest in occupations that paid even less than this -- between $9.17 and $14.06 per hour."

The basic survival annual income in Florida is $20,712 for an individual, or $55,164 for a family of four, the report said.

>>COVID-19 statistics made simple