Unemployment rates jump in SC for December

COLUMBIA -- A record number of South Carolinians were looking for work in December as the state's unemployment rate shot to 9.5 percent, the third-highest in the nation and the state's highest in more than 25 years, officials said Tuesday.

An additional 25,600 South Carolinians joined the jobless ranks last month, raising the total number of unemployed in the state to a record 207,171. The unemployment rate was up from 8.4 percent in November and 6.2 percent in December 2007.

MAJOR PEE DEE EMPLOYERS

Yahoo! Finance
Quote for LMDIB

In the Pee Dee and Grand Strand, unemployment rates ranged from a high of 19 percent in Marion County, up from 16.9 percent in November, to a low of 9.1 percent in Florence County, a figure up from 8 percent in November.

All counties in the scnow.com coverage area, with the exception of Florence County, were above the state average.

Following Marion County, which had the second highest unemployment rate in the state, was Marlboro County at No. 4 with an unemployment rate of 16.9 percent, up from 14.9 percent in November.

Dillon and Williamsburg Counties tied for the eighth highest unemployment rate in the state at 14.2 percent; Chesterfield had a rate of 13.1 percent at No. 15; Georgetown tied for No. 19 with 11.8 percent unemployment; Darlington ranked 21 with 11.7 percent unemployment and Horry County ranked 22 at 11.5 percent unemployment.

All reported higher unemployment figures than they had in November.

Marion County's unemployment rate is the highest since 1990, according to Sam McClary, a labor market analyst with the state's employment commission.

Because methodologies have changed, McClary said statistics before 1990 are not comparable to today's unemployment stats.

McClary, who has been a data analyst with the state for 38 years said he believes there was high unemployment in the Pee Dee County in the late 1970s, but that by December 1997, unemployment was a record low of 5.4 percent in Marion County.

Unemployment, though, started climbing in the county in 1998, he said.

Judy Jordan, assistant area director of the S.C. Employment Security Commission Florence Workforce Center, said the Florence office has only seen a slight increase in the number of people looking for work.

“We’ve had a little bit of increase as far of numbers of people filing (for unemployment),” she said. “It seems like we have had an increase in the number of people filing.”

But she said the numbers in the Pee Dee likely rose due to the closing of key facilities, such as Wellman Industries.

“We had the Wellman closure over the month of November and that did cause an increase,” Jordan said.

She said the results from the recent economic troubles in the Pee Dee have yet to be seen.

“I don’t know how it’s going to effect us,” Jordan said.

The national rate in December was 7.2 percent. Only Michigan, at 10.6 percent, and Rhode Island, at 10 percent, were worse off. South Carolina's increase over November's rate tied with Indiana for the largest month-to-month jump.

Almost every employment sector reported job losses in South Carolina in December, for a total of 22,000 jobs lost since November and 54,000 fewer jobs than in December 2007.

The economic downturn has hit Horry County and the workers who run its tourist-based economy especially hard.

"I can't speak for the rest of the counties, but I can tell you about Horry County and it's been really tough because under good circumstances, those people have figured out just about how they can make it through the year, well this year the hours started getting cut n the summer-- they didn't even make it to October, so it's been a tremendous impact on families trying to piece it together," Mary Nell Smith, area director at Coastal Workforce Center in Conway, said.

South Carolina's Employment Security Commission has said the state needs federal loans of more than $310 million to continue paying weekly benefits through March because of the unprecedented number of jobless in the state.

Republican Gov. Mark Sanford has accused the commission of mismanaging its money. He has demanded an audit of the agency and more detailed information about who is unemployed and why.

The state's top economists have predicted the unemployment rate in South Carolina could reach a historic 14 percent this year, but not all experts agree.

University of South Carolina economist Paulo Guimaraes said recently he expects the rate will stay under the 11.4 percent record set in January 1983, but acknowledged things are tough to predict.

"It's been so difficult to predict anything and things keep getting worse," Guimaraes said. "When you think there is a turning point, they find a way get worse."

-- Matt Robertson, scnow.com, and Aisha Khan, WBTW News13, Jamie Durant, Morning News and Dianne Owens, Marion Star & Mullins Enterprise, contributed to this report