By Elizabeth Hustad originally posted on Sept 25, 2024 by the Post and Courier North Augusta Star
She credits a first job working for Dairy Queen – earning $2.10 an hour and her mother advising that she better save half of it – with laying the foundations for success, both in business and in politics.
South Carolina Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette was in North Augusta on Sept. 17, speaking before Chamber of Commerce members and promoting school choice and youth employment as integral in South Carolina’s future economic competitiveness.
Evette said that DQ job taught her about the value of money and the value of saving, and about working with others and, sometimes, with difficult others.
But now, the nation is at its lowest point for youth employment, she said – kids aren’t excited about working and they’re not learning the foundational lessons taught in those first jobs.
About 55% of all 16- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. were working in July this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, though July is also statistically the peak as many of these youth take on summer jobs that are dropped when school is back in session.
By another measure, the youth labor force participation rate – those who are able to work and are doing so – was about 60 percent in July, or just under the nation’s overall participation rate for all working age citizens but significantly below the 83% for workers in the 25-54 age group.
Gov. Henry McMaster’s Workforce Scholarships for the Future, begun in November 2021, is meant to reskill and employ South Carolinians through leveraging the state’s technical college system.
But that initiative, though successful in training more than 32,000 of nurses, welders, forklift operators and commercial drivers – among others – also left “a vacuum,” Evette said.
That vacuum was the entry-level jobs not being filled by young South Carolinians: the DQ jobs that teach the first lessons.
Evette and McMaster have partnered with the state’s Department of Employment and Workforce to launch the “YES” initiative to ease entry into the job market for today’s youth.
The Youth Employment Site allows businesses across the state to post their starter jobs and for youth to search the database by inputting their zip code and age and having returned to them the available jobs in their area that are suited to them.
But even the lessons of first jobs have to start at home and in education, Evette said.
“I firmly believe if a child can read, a child can learn; if a child can learn, a child can be anything they want to be,” she said.
Both Evette and Gov. McMaster are proponents of school choice and “a complete voucher system” that, she said, could be especially helpful for rural areas.
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But the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled a portion of a pilot program of vouchers unconstitutional: public money from the state’s Education Scholarship Trust Fund, the ruling said, cannot be used for private school tuition, though it may be put toward tutoring, materials and other supportive needs.
During her stop in North Augusta, Evette also touched on the energy crisis and its impacts to South Carolina’s economy.
The rolling blackout that almost was on Christmas Day in 2022 was the impetus for heightened focus at the General Assembly.
“We squeaked by. But it did send a loud message,” Evette said.
Six months after the scare, Gov. McMaster issued an executive order creating PowerSC, a working group to engage with the state’s energy stakeholders and “develop strategic plans to ensure South Carolina has the energy capacity to meet the needs of the state’s record-breaking economic development and population growth.”
“All the careers of the future, whether it comes as security or grid, AI – these are all big energy producers,” Evette said. And “South Carolina, we’re famous for manufacturing. Manufacturing requires energy.”
The state is also the fastest growing in the nation as far as population goes, at least according to 2023 estimates. South Carolina ranked 10th for the 2020 Census, having grown by 10 percent.
Doing “whatever we can at the state level to help our businesses continue to grow,” is paramount, Evette said. “We’re going to work on education. We’re going to work on our workforce. We’re working on energy. We’re trying to give you everything you need to make South Carolina grow.”
Speaking with reporters after her Chamber appearance, Evette acknowledged South Carolina’s No. 2 spot in this year’s Area Development Rankings, the second time the state has been runner-up to Georgia as best state to do business.
Evette said the No. 2 ranking was a show of “South Carolina’s fingerprints,” a reference to remarks she’d made just 30 minutes prior to the state’s manufacturing sector and its being home to some of the largest manufacturing plants in the country: wherever BMWs and Bridgestonetires are seen, that’s largely South Carolina production.
“And we’re just building,” she said. Investing in career opportunities that keep the “best and brightest” here and providing for ease of doing business –including basic hospitality – are big, she said.
More than offering a site to new industry, we stay with them, we connect them with our technical colleges, we work on getting them a workforce. And we’re with them all the way to the day they open up their door,” she said.
Evette will be back in North Augusta later this year, partnering with Major League Baseball as MLB hosts a kids baseball clinic at SRP Park.
Get kids excited about working, she said, but also get kids excited about getting outside and moving again (and leaving the phone behind).
