It’s easy to complain that people would rather lounge around the house drawing inflated unemployment checks than take one of the tens of thousands of jobs that are going unfilled across South Carolina.
It’s tougher to help people get the skills they need to qualify for those jobs. That’s also infinitely more valuable, because people who are trained to do jobs they want to do are more likely to remain in those jobs, and advance in those jobs, and help not only the businesses that hire them but also themselves and their families.
It was never clear how much the extra $300 a week that most unemployed South Carolinians were receiving in recent months was motivating them to turn down job offers. But some employers blamed their problems on those extended federal unemployment benefits, and it was easier for politicians to make that us-vs.-them argument than to explain that the main justification for extended benefits is to keep the economy afloat, which is no longer a problem now that our jobless rate is back down to what was considered full employment within this century.
So we were delighted to see Gov. Henry McMaster pivot on Monday to focus on helping train the 87,000 unemployed South Carolinians whose federal benefits he’s cutting off later this month. He had already announced in January that he was allocating $8 million in federal Governor's Emergency Education Relief Funds to the S.C. Technical College System to provide training for high-demand jobs. On Tuesday, he joined with college leaders to launch the program, which allows people enrolled in the state unemployment system to skip their required weekly job searches if they take the courses.
Skipping the “searches” might motivate some people to sign up, but the real draw here is the free training, of up to 16 weeks, to receive certification for any of 11 job skills that S.C. employers are desperately seeking, from welding and patient care to truck driving and internet technology.
It’s not merely a better use of the money than the governor’s original plan to pay parents to send their kids to private schools — which might or might not be better than the public schools the children were attending and to which, we should note, S.C. Education Superintendent Molly Spearman just distributed another $39 million in federal COVID relief funding on Tuesday. It's also a really smart investment.
The training problem is a fine example of the sort of cooperation between state agencies — in this case the Department of Employment and Workforce and the technical colleges — that we ought to be able to take for granted, but never have been in South Carolina.
You know the cliche: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. As S.C. Rep. Brian White told the audience gathered for the launch: “We’ve been getting fish for a while. Now it’s time to go fishing.”
The $8 million will provide free training for 3,100 people, and Mr. McMaster said he hopes to turn the program into a permanent part of our unemployment system. Assuming it works the way he and we hope, that’s a great idea.
And it’s a reminder that billions of dollars in federal COVID funding have given us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something we've never been particularly good at doing in South Carolina: Try out new programs, with an understanding that we will find a way to keep the ones that work — and either overhaul or abandon the ones that don’t. It's a chance we can't afford to blow.
