Tens of thousands of people continue to rely on unemployment benefits in South Carolina as the state's economy continues its slow climb out of the pandemic-induced recession.
The latest numbers released by the U.S. Department of Labor suggests roughly 179,000 people continued to file jobless claims with the S.C. Department of Employment and Workforce in the middle of November.
The federal data also shows that roughly 2,683 people filed an initial application for unemployment benefits last week, which often signals how many new layoffs occurred in the state.
Not all of those people will be eligible to collect unemployment assistance, but the numbers clearly indicate that South Carolina's economy has not fully rebounded from the severe downturn it endured earlier this year.
Last week, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report that raised some concerns over how accurate the weekly unemployment claim numbers are.
The way the U.S. Department of Labor calculates the number of people who are continually filing for unemployment over multiple weeks has caused issues in reporting this year, the GAO said.
Those so-called continued claims are a metric that economists frequently use to judge the health of the workforce. But backlogs in processing claims at the state level and other problems caused by the coronavirus pandemic have skewed those numbers this year, the GAO reported.
"Issues arising from the pandemic have made this practice problematic—potentially overstating the number of individuals in certain circumstances and understating the number in others," the report said.
Even so, other statistics reported by DEW each week clearly confirm that South Carolina still has an unemployment crisis on its hands.
The state agency reported Thursday that 119,420 people were actually receiving money as a result of their unemployment claims last week. Those people were vetted by DEW and found to be qualified for up to $326 per week.
Many of those unemployment applicants could soon lose that financial support, however, as a number of federal jobless programs expire later this month.
The first program to lapse in South Carolina will be the so-called extended benefits program. That federal aid program, which provides an extra 10 weeks of benefits, will end on Dec. 12 because South Carolina's unemployment rate dropped low enough that the state is no longer eligible.
The roughly 10,000 people who were trying to collect benefits from that program in November may be the first to get booted from the unemployment system, but they are unlikely to be the last.
Two other federal jobless programs, known as Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, are also set to expire by the end of December unless Congress passes a bill to extend them.
The latest data showed tens of thousands of people were also trying to collect aid through those programs in the middle of November.
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