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More local people find jobs in March

Gov. Mark Sanford said Monday there was “a drop in the unemployment rate for every county in the state.”

Yet Saturday’s headline in The T&D read: S.C. jobless rate edges up in March.

Which statement is correct? Actually, both are accurate, because they are referring to different rates.

The governor on Monday cited the unadjusted unemployment rate, which was 6.9 percent in February and declined to 6.4 percent in March.

The Associated Press article in Saturday’s paper quoted the seasonally adjusted rate, which was 6.4 percent in February and increased to 6.5 percent in March.

The seasonally adjusted rate takes into account cyclical changes in the job market. For instance, most public school teachers are on 10-month contracts, tourism peaks at certain times of the year and many businesses hire temporary workers around the holidays.

Neither of the numbers includes the under-employed — who are working part-time jobs because they cannot find full-time jobs — or those who are unemployed and have given up looking for a job.

n Local numbers

The county-by-county jobless rates announced for March by the South Carolina Employment Security Commission are also unadjusted. According to the ESC:

l Orangeburg County has a work force of 41,300, of whom 3,430 (8.3 percent) are unemployed. The February jobless rate was 10.6 percent.

l Calhoun County has a work force of 7,300, of whom 460 (6.3 percent) are unemployed. The February rate was 7.8 percent.

l Bamberg County has a work force of 6,790, of whom 590 (8.7 percent) are unemployed. The rate is unchanged from February.

Double-digit unemployment was reported in seven counties: Marion (highest at 12.3 percent), Union, Allendale, Williamsburg, McCormick, Chester and Marlboro.

Barnwell had the ninth highest unadjusted jobless rate; Bamberg, 13th; Orangeburg, 17th; Calhoun, 33rd; Dorchester, 41st; and Lexington, 45th.

Counties with unadjusted jobless rates under 5 percent included Beaufort (lowest at 4.3 percent), Lexington, Jasper, Greenville, Dorchester, Charleston, Horry, Aiken and Berkeley.

n Political football

Last Friday, Democrats took jabs at the governor over the seasonally adjusted jobless numbers.

“We continue to fall further and further behind the rest of the nation,” said Senate Democratic Leader John C. Land III of Manning.

Joe Erwin, South Carolina Democratic Party chairman, said, “Gov. Sanford would rather blame the Department of Labor for passing out bad numbers than work to create jobs in South Carolina.”

But on Monday, the governor said “employment is at an all-time high” in South Carolina and “our state is in the top third of all states for job growth.”

Sanford said the jobless rate is “largely a product of a rapidly increasing labor force. ... There are over 117,000 more people working in South Carolina” than in January 2003.