A few weeks ago I went to the SC Employment Security Commission office in Greenville for a mandatory meeting to update officials there on the status of my seven month long search for a new job. The waiting room was filled to capacity with a line stretching around the room. You could find a representative from nearly every walk of life in that room; young and old, black, white, brown, white- collar, blue-collar workers, high school drop outs and college graduates. The common thread among all of us was our need for employment. No one there seemed happy or comfortable in their unemployed state; no one spoke of the joys of being jobless. I was impressed by the professional and prompt service provided by the over-worked staff at the local ESC office. When I thanked the young woman who updated my paperwork and approved an extension of my unemployment benefits, she said she did her very best to complete everyone’s paperwork at the end of the day, often working until 7 o’clock or “until they turned the computers off for the day.”

Because I am unemployed I was especially disturbed to learn this morning that jobless South Carolinians eligible for an extension in their benefits will not be receiving those monies made available by the federal government as part of the economic stimulus bill because the legislature failed to adjust the economic index used to calculate additional emergency benefits in times of unprecedented financial hardship. Published reports indicate that South Carolina and Mississippi are the only states eligible for the extended benefits but NOT receiving them.  U.S. Rep. John Spratt Jr. was among the first to notice that South Carolina was shut out of tens of millions of dollars in benefits. “South Carolina missed the boat on free federal benefits that were available to its residents at virtually no cost to its populous,” said Andrew Stettner of the National Employment Law Project.

As you might imagine the blame game for the screw up has already begun. Roosevelt “Ted” Halley, the outgoing executive director of the SC ESC told The Post and Courier that his office knew about the changes after receiving information from the US Labor Department but he failed to discuss it with state legislators. Legislators can’t claim they didn’t know about the clause contained in the stimulus bill because officials at the Columbia-based Appleseed Legal Justice Center met with key state lawmakers to discuss the need for changes in the index but couldn’t find a sponsor for the bill amid the debate over accepting the stimulus with Gov. Mark Sanford. One lawmaker not named in published reports admitted that he misunderstood the terms of the extended benefits, thinking it could increase the state’s unemployment fund debt.  Perhaps he was too busy wrapping up the legislative session to further investigate the possibility of financial assistant to jobless South Carolinians he was elected to represent. South Carolina’s unemployment rate currently stands at 11.5% one of the highest in the country and 113,000 South Carolinians have already exhausted their current unemployment benefits.

State lawmakers would have to convene a special session to correct the error and qualify for the extended benefits. Meanwhile the final benefit checks for about 7,000 jobless South Carolinians go out on Saturday.

This entire fiasco is yet another example of the bankruptcy of leadership in South Carolina. We are a rudderless ship in an economic storm.