I thought that headline would grab you.
But congratulations are in order, as the governor signs legislation giving himself some control of the state unemployment agency. Finally, after eight long years of waiting, the governor signs a tiny piece of the kind of government restructuring that he ran on in 2002 (which was the largest positive reason why we endorsed him at the time; another was his commitment to transparency, but let’s not go into that right now).
This congratulatory message, however, is weighted down by several caveats:
- As a long-time unemployed person myself, it’s hard for me to imagine a person I would less want to be in charge of the unemployment insurance apparatus. This is a guy who, when our state’s pitifully inadequate benefit payments outstrip the pitiful amounts this state has been putting into the fund over the years, immediately wants to accuse the agency of wrongdoing, of being spendthrifts. It doesn’t occur to him that more than 12 percent of South Carolinians are out of work (actually, the numbers much higher — I am among the many thousands who removed themselves from being counted when I got out of the system last September), and if it did occur to him it wouldn’t matter, because he doesn’t really care, near as I can tell.
- The Legislature has made this move not BECAUSE Mark Sanford is governor, but IN SPITE OF that fact. In other words, he can’t claim any credit. That lawmakers made this move with him in office is testimony to the royal cock-up that the ESC has made of the situation.
- Only Mark Sanford could have made the Employment Security Commissioners look good. But he accomplished that, by utterly ignoring the agency until it became politically advantageous to him to start bashing it. You can read about that here. Unfortunately, the rather compelling video that supported that column is no longer up. (I made the mistake of putting up some videos on The State’s service rather than YouTube for awhile, and all of those have disappeared.)
All of that said, this was needed reform for the following reasons, among others:
- All executive department agencies should report to the governor, who is the elected chief executive. The fragmentation of authority we have in South Carolina — and the ESC, with its commissioners appointed by the Legislature, is one of the poster children — makes it impossible to hold anyone accountable when things go wrong.
- Things HAVE gone wrong at the ESC. Yes, the Legislature has failed to fill the coffers sufficiently to be prepared for this infernally long rainy day, but the commissioners were derelict in their duty to make that fact clear.
Anyway, all of that said, congratulations, governor. And I can hardly wait until we have a NEW governor, who will actually have the credibility and mandate to move that critical agency into the kind of safety net that our state’s workers need.
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How do you get out of the unemployment count? Do you decline unemployment compensation? If so, what benefit is there for doing that?
@ Walter– The unemployment count only counts those actively looking for work. Plenty have given up. Plenty never register as unemployed–maybe they have a severance package and aren’t eligible to claim, or they left their jobs voluntarily, which also limits their claiming rights, maybe they just don’t get around to it or don’t trust the government…
And here’s my situation:
— First, the weekly unemployment benefit in South Carolina is a pitiful amount. It’s based on your pay before you lost your job, but the MAX is a little over $300 a week (I don’t have the exact amount in front of me).
— That’s not so bad if you go out and make a little additional money, say, flipping burgers, right? WRONG. Every penny you make comes OUT of your $300 or so a week. Make $200 working, and you only get a $100 check. So basically, there’s no incentive to help yourself by working, if you’re content with the measly state benefit.
— I was never content with that. So in the course of the whole last year, I only got a weekly check either three or four times. There were other weeks I could have gotten it if I had kept up with things better, but that’s all I got.
— In September, I decided to take early retirement from The State, after determining that, even though I would only get 55 percent of what my monthly pension would have been had I waited to 65, I would still get a larger cumulative payout until I reached age 77. After that, I’d be losing out, but hey, that’s a long way off, right?
— This truncated pension was a very small fraction of my salary — not a third, not a fourth, not a fifth. Keep going… even smaller… And yet it was still slightly more money than a month’s worth of the weekly unemployment benefit.
So I stopped filing for it.
Sounds familiar. When I had my brief experience with receiving unemployment comp, it ended swiftly as soon as the folks at ESC found out I had started my own company. It just wouldn’t have been fair to continue getting compensation when I was raking in all that fresh dough (cough, cough).