Director who led SC’s employment agency through COVID to retire in 2023
Dan Ellzey, South Carolina’s workforce and employment director who led the agency through the COVID-19 pandemic and a subsequent spike in unemployment, will retire at the end of February.
Ellzey and Gov. Henry McMaster made the joint announcement Thursday.
As director of the Department of Employment and Workforce, Ellzey, who joined McMaster’s Cabinet in 2019, oversaw unemployment benefits to laid off workers and oversaw efforts geared toward helping unemployed people find jobs.
A successor for Ellzey, 74, has not been nominated, and will need to be confirmed by the state Senate.
“Director Ellzey has been a crucial part of the team that helped South Carolina successfully navigate the unprecedented economic challenges caused by the pandemic, and come out stronger on the other side,” McMaster said.
The bulk of Ellzey’s focus over the last two years was COVID-19 and its impact on South Carolina workers.
At the height of pandemic, South Carolina’s unemployment rate hit 12.8%, leading to a spike in unemployment claims.
As South Carolina in 2020 sought to reopen its economy faster than other states, the agency began encouraging laid off workers to find jobs again. McMaster was often criticized for allowing businesses to reopen too quickly as COVID-19 was still spreading and people were still dying from the disease.
“What we did is encourage people who were well and able to work to go ahead and do it,” Ellzey said Thursday from the State House, defending the agency’s push to get people back to work. “We wanted to make sure everyone understood that the research shows, that (the) best jobs go first. If you don’t get one, you’re going to be looking at the bottom of the list if you wait for benefits to end. We weren’t pushing sick people at all.”
Going back to work became even more important in 2021 after South Carolina stopped taking additional federal unemployment assistance for laid off workers because businesses complained they could not find people to fill jobs.
After the state stopped taking the federal unemployment benefits, DEW reinstated work-search requirements so people laid off could still get unemployment payments.
South Carolina’s economy has since rebounded, with the unemployment rate currently at 3.3%.
In 2020, Ellzey warned state leaders that the unemployment insurance trust fund — which pays out unemployment assistance benefits — was potentially running out of money because of the spike in benefits paid to people unemployed caused by the pandemic.
State lawmakers later spent more than $900 million in federal COVID-19 money to replenish the trust fund and prevent increases in unemployment insurance tax rates. In November, Ellzey and McMaster announced unemployment insurance tax rates will decrease or remain the same for all employers for the 10th year in a row.
Before joining McMaster’s Cabinet, Ellzey was a partner at Fisher Phillips law firm, where he advised companies on labor relations, including union campaigns and elections, collective bargaining and labor arbitration.
