South Carolina lawmakers aiming to extend jobless benefits

South Carolina lawmakers said Monday they will return to the Capitol next week to ensure thousands of state residents receive extended unemployment benefits.
House Speaker Bobby Harrell and Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, both Charleston Republicans, agreed to the extraordinary move and criticized the state Employment Security Commission for failing to get the Legislature involved in heading off a problem that this week made 6,700 of the state’s unemployed ineligible for extended benefits.
“The General Assembly will take quick action to fix this oversight by the ESC to ensure that unemployed South Carolinians will not suffer further by being denied this federal benefit,” Harrell and McConnell said in a joint statement.
“It is unfortunate that the Legislature must return to fix this problem, this oversight was completely avoidable” and shows the need to overhaul how the commission operates.
Even before the new wave of workers lost benefits, the state had more than 113,000 people who had exhausted all state and federal regular and extended benefits in the midst of an 11.5 percent unemployment rate, which is the nation’s sixth highest.
The federal government made stimulus money available for 20 weeks of extended benefits.
To get the final seven weeks, states had to tie emergency jobless relief to the unemployment rate. But South Carolina’s emergency payments are instead tied to people receiving jobless checks. Because legislators didn’t temporarily change that law, the extra benefits weren’t available. South Carolina was the only state that needed to make the change that didn’t, according to the National Employment Law Project in New York.
And a quick, one-day return means legislators won’t be in town when the State Ethics Commission releases a report that would fuel more impeachment discussion.