The Jobs Plan

The Jim Rex Plan:
Jobs Now. Jobs for a Strong Future.

Click here to download the entire Jobs Plan PDF

Introduction
Too many South Carolina families are hurting right now. Wall Street may be looking up, but tell that to the nearly 100,000 thousand South Carolina workers who have lost their jobs this year. The number triples when you include those who entered the recession unemployed or have been forced into lower-paying jobs just to try to make ends  meet [1].

Meanwhile, our state is adrift. Our political leadership is preoccupied with personal scandal and petty partisanship, neither of which does anything to help get us through this crisis. This is not a time to lose focus. There are a series of actions that our government can take right now to protect the jobs that we still have and to put more people back to work immediately to get our state on the road to economic recovery. But in addition to these immediate steps, we also need to view this period as a wake-up call. South Carolina needs to do more to position itself for the jobs of the future in a whole range of exciting and innovative new fields and industries.

For too long, we've allowed short-term thinking and special-interest politics to get in the way of economic progress. If we are going to succeed at creating stable, good wage jobs in our state, we need to focus on the unique assets that make us strong and competitive.

It starts with our hardworking people and the natural resources and quality of life that can attract new employers and capital investment. Governors Campbell and Riley worked hard to attract new businesses to the state, bringing investments, jobs and training programs to develop a skilled labor force. Recently we've been in the news for public embarrassment, not ambassadorship. I will turn that around, restoring pride and dignity to our state, ensuring that business leaders across the country and around the world know that South Carolina is a sound investment with a beautiful environment, welcoming people, great quality of life and an educational system on the move.

So my jobs program has two parts.

  • Jobs Now. This part is an aggressive action plan to protect our jobs and create new ones.
  • Jobs for a Strong Future. This is a medium-to-long-term plan to prepare our workforce for jobs in innovative new fields as well as expansion of jobs in current sectors that provide the kind of good-wage jobs we desperately need.

Both Jobs Now and Jobs for a Strong Future make a powerful connection to something I know well: education. Attracting these jobs to South Carolina will not happen if we are not aggressive today in preparing our workforce, so we must continue to strengthen our advantages in areas of higher education, workforce training/retraining, and research. Our state's strong technical college system and our universities must be active participants in a coordinated effort to identify which industries are suited for the different regions of our state and to provide the educational programs necessary to prepare a highly skilled workforce for those targeted jobs.

1. Unemployment figures taken from Bureau of Labor Statistics Nov 2008-Nov 2009 and State of South Carolina Annual Financial Report through June 30, 2009.

2. For instance, last year, we initiated a pilot program called GreenSTEM, which is a high school program that gets students ready for jobs in the emerging field of green energy. In addition, we must commercialize ideas emerging from our research universities to further expand job opportunities. But there are other vital areas beyond education that must be addressed if we are to be successful. We need to improve our state's infrastructure, from our transportation infrastructure to our financial infrastructure, to be sure our state is an attractive place for new businesses. We need fairer taxes for working families and for the small businesses that are the engine of our state's economic growth. We need to manage our state well and make sure that we are effective in putting state dollars to work right here at home and maximizing available federal dollars wherever possible. And we need to look at our incentive structure to provide the right incentives to attract new businesses to our state while ensuring that existing companies stay and expand.
 

Part 1: Jobs Now.
Part 2: Jobs for a Strong Future.

[1] Unemployment figures taken from Bureau of Labor Statistics Nov 2008-Nov 2009 and State of South Carolina Annual Financial Report through June 30, 2009 .