South Carolina lost about 3,646 jobs last month, as the coronavirus pandemic increased and the state’s economic recovery stagnated.
The fall in employment in December marks the second consecutive month that South Carolina reportedly cut jobs.
This is not a good sign, especially with the state still losing more than 100,000 paid positions that existed before the new coronavirus was first detected in March last year.
The state’s unemployment rate, which Governor Henry McMaster recently praised in his state speech, rose from 4.4% in November to 4.6% in December.
It is still lower than the national unemployment rate, which fluctuates around 6.7%.
The relatively low rate of unemployment in South Carolina can be somewhat misleading, however. It is true that South Carolina’s unemployment rate has improved dramatically since last April, when it rose 12.8% during the first outbreak of coronavirus cases.
But the drop since then was not just the result of the state adding jobs to the economy. A significant part of it is influenced by the abandonment of the labor market.
In the past six months, South Carolina has seen large numbers of people leave the state’s active workforce.
Data from the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics suggest that about 118,000 fewer people were participating in the state’s workforce in December compared to July. This means that these people are no longer actively looking for jobs and, as a result, do not count towards the state’s unemployment rate.
If you add these people back to the workforce, the state’s unemployment rate will be around 9%.
People can leave the workforce for a variety of reasons, especially during difficult economic times.
Some parents are now taking care of their children during virtual learning and are therefore not looking for a job. Some people may have retired earlier as a result of the current crisis. And others may have been so frustrated with job prospects that they gave up looking for work.
Dan Ellzey, the Executive Director of the SC Department of Employment and Workforce, attributed the relatively negative jobs report in December to the uncertainty that swirled at the end of last year as Congress debated whether to approve another federal stimulus package.
Ellzey encouraged people who remain unemployed to use his agency to find new jobs, and he noted that there are currently 75,000 vacancies advertised on the DEW website.
The problem in the past few months, however, has been combining available jobs with the education, training and qualification sets of remaining unemployed workers in South Carolina.
The jobs report released on Tuesday shows that many of the jobs the state lost last year were in sectors that do not always require employees to have an undergraduate degree or specialized training.
The state’s restaurants, hotels and other businesses in the leisure and hospitality industry, for example, employed 43,500 fewer people in late 2020 than in the previous year.
Reach Andrew Brown at 843-708-1830 or follow him on Twitter @andy_ed_brown.