SC’s ‘essential’ public workers should get COVID-19 bonus, Midlands lawmakers say
Roughly 15,000 South Carolina state employees were considered essential during the COVID-19 outbreak — and required to physically go to work, versus being allowed to work from home — and now two state senators from the Midlands want to see them get paid extra for their work.
The senators — Democrat Darrell Jackson, of Richland, and Republican Katrina Shealy, of Lexington — want to give $1,000 one-time bonuses to up to 15,000 state employees. They will push lawmakers, who return to work mid-September to craft a state budget, to spend at least $15 million of the state’s federal CARES Act money on the bonuses.
The Legislature has more than $600 million left over to spend in the federal coronavirus money.
And in the coming budget year with forecasters projecting a sharp revenue decline because of COVID-19 that could put any initial pay raise proposals at risk, lawmakers say a one-time bonus could go a long way.
“Highway patrolman had to go and leave their house. Correctional officers, too,” Jackson said. “It’s very important that we reward them for having to put themselves and their families at risk, because others did not necessarily have to do that.”
In March, Gov. Henry McMaster ordered that all non-essential state employees must work from home as the outbreak spread, directing agency leaders to determine which employees on their payroll could work from home in order to curb the virus.
Under his same order, McMaster also said that local government offices must provide unlimited access to their buildings if state agency offices were housed inside, allowing South Carolinians to still be able to access state services if needed.
At the time, more than 15,000 state workers were still reporting to their offices, the Governor’s Office said then.
“I don’t know how you can even spell relief any better than giving some type of compensation to the people who literally sacrificed their lives to leave their houses every morning for the betterment of this state,” Jackson said.
Jackson said he’d like to get the one-time bonus to state employees before Thanksgiving.
And he’s hopeful that with Shealy’s support the proposal will get more bipartisan buy-in before lawmakers return to work next month.
“We tried to get them bonuses last year, but things have gotten so murky, and so we didn’t get finished last year,” Shealy said of state employees, many of whom live in her Lexington County district, about a 15-mile drive outside of the capital.
“It would be a big help to them.”
This story was originally published August 25, 2020 at 12:43 PM.
