SEPT. 4, 2009 -- This was supposed to be the week Patrick Ryan showed off his new truck.
It was supposed to be the week the Charleston architect began to help pay down his wife’s medical school bills and their family‘s credit card debt. And got serious about replacing the aluminum porch roof on the front of his house with a new “modern element.”
But none of that is going to happen. Not this week, and probably not for a bunch of weeks to come, because Monday, a week short of Labor Day, Ryan lost his job.
He wasn’t alone. Two weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics reported that South Carolina’s unemployment rate was 11.8 percent for the month of July. That was a full half-point better than the month before, when the state’s unemployment rate ranked third nationally at 12.3 percent.
Filing for unemployment
On Thursday, Ryan trudged downtown to the local office of the S.C. Employment Security Commission to apply for unemployment benefits. Sitting in the waiting room, holding a piece of paper with the number 306 in his hand, Ryan blended in.
Ryan
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Seated near Ryan was a young woman holding a screaming baby and brushing back orange-colored hair extensions. There were hulking working stiffs with construction site goo from their last job still affixed to their boots. There were also banker types, squirming and casting uncomfortable glances about.
This wasn’t “supposed” to happen to Ryan.
The son of a judge, Ryan earned a five-year degree from Auburn, the moral equivalent to a master’s in his field. He worked hard in college, taking part in a seminal architecture program, Rural Studio, that rebuilt homes and community buildings for the backwater poor with a combination of daring design, environmental sustainability and donated construction materials.
But despite all of his good work, Ryan this week found himself as vulnerable as anyone else on the job food-chain. In his case, banks went south, taking their loans with them. And that meant there were no new homes or bigger structures to build, and that meant less architects were needed.
“My boss kept me on as long as he could,” Ryan said. “But when he saw me checking out new trucks online, he knew it was time to tell me I was next.”
Tough times in the Pee Dee
That same economic downturn has hit all over the job spectrum. Just ask Candy Player, a 41-year-old mother of one living in Johnsonville. Her PeeDee town sits in hard-hit Williamsburg County, where the successive deaths of agriculture, textiles and manufacturing have ballooned unemployment to 16.1 percent -- still not the highest in the state and a two-tenths of an improvement from the previous month.
Recently laid off from her latest job at a local sewing factory, she said her husband had to lay-off their son from the sand pit he manages. Her son is now in Kuwait, having entered the armed services.
“Golf courses don’t need sand, and no one is selling concrete,” said Player, seated in the state job center in Kingstree.
Player said her first love, job wise, was “finance, short-term loans,” but that she was willing to try something else. A job with health care insurance would be nice, as neither she nor her husband, who still works reduced hours at the sand pit, could use some coverage.
Waiting for her eligibility review, Player said she would settle for a job she didn’t have to drive far to get to. “I could go to Florence or Myrtle Beach, but the jobs would have to pay really well” to make up for the expense of the gas to get there, she said.
There’s another way Williamsburg County residents can get to jobs, mostly domestic ones, in Myrtle Beach, according to Jimmy L. Wilson, the Employment Security Commission’s area director. They can get on a daily bus provided by the area transit authority, which carries residents for an hour to the Horry County line, where another bus ferries them to the Grand Strand.
As grim as that may sound, Wilson said things were improving in his area. Even though lines still form at his job center past Wednesday afternoon, when they traditionally slackened before the recession hit. He said “a lot of the tension has gone” as some area businesses, and some new ones, have finally begun taking on new employees.
Mixed reviews on the economy
Gwen Richardson, who runs the unemployment office in Moncks Corner, had a more tangible measuring stick. “When I get to work on Fridays, the line doesn’t stretch outside my building,” she said. Just down the interior hall of the building.
But Charlie Haneman, who holds the same job for Greenville County, hasn’t seen the light at the end of the tunnel. Grateful for one of the lowest unemployment rates in the state at just over 10 percent, Haneman pointed out that with a workforce of 230,000, that meant close to 23,000 people in his county were still out of work.
Back in Kingstree, Darrin and Ethel Mae Simmons of Lake City may have gotten some good news this week. Darrin, who has been out of work since April 2008, recently got a letter from Columbia that he may not have exhausted all of his unemployment benefits.
The state regularly has provided up to six months of unemployment pay, but with the recession, has loosened up an additional 13 weeks, and with the federal government, in some cases, up to another 13 weeks. That can total a full year on the dole.
“I don’t see any turnaround, not one bit,” said Ethel Mae, who used to be a bus driver. “I don’t see a lot of hope for us poor people.”
Despite reports that Gov. Mark Sanford took time on job junkets to South America to hunt doves and meet with his Argentine mistress, Ethel Mae didn’t want to see him impeached.
“Leave that man alone and go out and get some jobs for us,” she said, as her husband was called to meet with an eligibility review officer, probably to hear that what he’d received was an automated letter and that there were no more benefits.