SC’s Unemployment Crisis
By Rep. Anton J. Gunn
On Tuesday, I was invited by Gov. Mark Sanford to attend a roundtable meeting with business leaders, employment experts, policymakers and politicians to look deeper into the unemployment crisis facing our state. I was surprised to see only a handful of lawmakers from the House and Senate at the meeting. It seems to me that this issue is too important to the people of our state for only a handful — less than 25 of the 170 members in the General Assembly — to attend the meeting. We have to do better.
Nevertheless, I gained a great deal more information about the crisis at the meeting. The problems of the unemployed in our state are much bigger than just helping people find a job. It also involves taxes on businesses, workforce development, agency coordination, personal responsibility and eliminating political infighting. The crisis of the unemployed in our state did not just happen overnight. It is a culmination of an outdated and underfunded insurance system, vague information from employers and workers, lack of coordination between multiple state agencies and most importantly inefficient and ineffective leadership that fell asleep at the wheel (including the General Assembly, Governor’s Office and the leadership at the Employment Security Commission). Yes, this problem grew over a period of years and most of our state’s leaders had no knowledge or willingness to do anything to address the crisis that was looming. To me it seems as if we knew we were on the Titanic and that there was an Iceberg in the water but we didn’t do anything to avoid hitting it. Now we (and the whole nation) see that once again South Carolina has dropped the ball.
If you don’t believe that we have dropped the ball, here are a few stats that I found interesting from the meeting:
* 25% of people that file Unemployment Claims in SC, our state doesn’t have any information on their educational level. How can we help people find jobs if we don’t know their education level?
* 22.8% of the claims from Jan 2006 – June 2009 were for misconduct. 56% of those claims received pay. What was the misconduct? No one could tell us a definitive answer but we heard misconduct was mostly thefts and drug use.
* 17.6 percent of claims were filed by employers. Which means some companies are laying off workers and helping them to file unemployment and then calling it as vacation leave time or “Unemployment Insurance Holiday” but they never really separated from the workers and they hire them right back. Why would they do this? See the next three bullets below.
* SC is only 1 of 9 states that still allows employers to filed claims for workers.
* 3% of companies account for 30% of benefits charged yet pay only 8% of contributions into the system.
* SC also is only 1 of 6 states (soon only 1 of 4) that still uses the Federal Minimum Wage Base of $7,000 to collect unemployment payments. The national average is $14,302 and the national range is from $7,000 to $35,700.
* SC has the 11th-highest Exhaustion Rate (meaning, we aren’t helping people to find jobs fast enough before their benefits run out).
Now that we have all of this background information we must move forward and figure out how to fix this situation and the current crisis that has just caused some 30,000 unemployed South Carolinians to lose their unemployment benefits even though they have not found gainful employment. Well, there is some good news and some not-so-good news. The good news is the South Carolina House of Representatives will be returning to Columbia on Tuesday, October 29th to address the issue facing unemployed workers. It also seems there is a willingness by most General Assembly members to support a change in our laws that would allow South Carolina to draw down more federal recovery dollars to provide “extended unemployment benefits” to those 30,000 workers who were just cut off of unemployment benefits. So to all of those workers who are now out of benefits, I do not expect there to be a fight over accepting Stimulus money. So, we hope that help is on the way to you and your family.
The not-so-good news is that there are countless other unemployed South Carolinians who had their benefits cut off long ago (but are still without gainful employment) who no one is talking about. What about those unemployed workers whose benefits were previously terminated? Where are they? Where are the jobs for these workers? What is being done to help them get back to work?
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