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Jobs Take Center Stage
Attendees at a White House summit offered ideas for job growth that included tax incentives, easier access to skilled talent abroad and boosting infrastructure spending. President Obama plans to review the suggestions offered during the summit -- which was derided as a PR stunt timed to coincide with a slightly positive unemployment report -- and turn them into plans for his administration.
President Barack Obama challenged a group of 130 business leaders, union heads, economists and others to figure out ways to create jobs during a Jobs and Economic Growth Forum at the White House on Thursday. Although unemployment currently sits at 10 percent, according to a report released Friday, the government has limited resources to create jobs, so private industry must be integral in fighting the problem, said the president. "While I believe that government has a critical role in creating the conditions for economic growth, ultimately, true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector," said Obama in his opening remarks to the group. "It is only when the private sector starts to reinvest again, only when our businesses start hiring again and people start spending again and families start seeing improvement in their own lives again that we're going to have the kind of economy that we want," he said. Tax incentives, an easier way to bring skilled talent into the United States and a better relationship between the government and U.S. businesses abroad were among the suggestions, although critics maligned the summit as a public relations stunt. During the day-long event, the President cautioned the attendees to devise cost-effective ideas, taking into account the increasing deficit and the billions in stimulus money that has already been allocated. "We can't make any ill-considered decisions right now, even with the best of intentions," Obama said. "We're going to have to be surgical and we're going to have to be creative. We're going to have to be smart and strategic. We'll need to look beyond the old standbys and fallbacks and come up with the best ideas that give us the biggest bang for the buck." Some of those ideas included boosting infrastructure spending with the help of private industry as well as incentivizing home weatherization and investments in clean energy. On international matters, some group members stressed the need for more aggressive enforcement of trade laws to level the playing field abroad, more trade missions, a more sympathetic consular service abroad for U.S. businesses and expanded visas for skilled workers. Larry Lindsey, a former National Economic Council chairman, said American businesses are desperate for the issuance of more H1-B visas. "Intellectual capital is extremely mobile on this planet and we are erecting barriers to it," says Lindsey. "It is very hard to bring talented people into this country." Others, such as Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox, focused on lack of talent. "It is getting much more difficult for us to get talent to keep the engine going," she said. The attendees also recommended that the government provide additional tax incentives for job growth. New York-based retailer Liz Claiborne Inc. was set to close 10 stores until Obama signed tax incentives into law a few weeks earlier. Now the company is saving those stores and opening an additional 25, said Obama. At the end of the summit, the president hailed the group's ideas and said he believes many of them can "translate immediately into administrative plans." His administration plans to review the suggestions and Obama said he will present the details of some of the preferred ideas shortly. Meanwhile, conservatives maligned the conference as a PR stunt, saying it was timed to occur a day before some positive unemployment numbers were to be released. House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner of Ohio even held a "Where are the Jobs? Summit" as the official summit was occurring. He blames the administration's anti-business policies for the loss of jobs. "It's no secret that unemployment is now over 10 percent. Three million Americans have lost their jobs this year alone and the biggest problem we heard from our economists with regard to why employers aren't hiring -- It's all the job killing policies that being offered by this administration and this Congress, and creating an awful lot of uncertainty for American employers," he says. Kate Donovan, managing director of Milwaukee-based Manpower Business Solution, says she agrees with the president that sustainable job creation must come from private industry. Even in light of the jobs summit and the encouraging unemployment numbers released Friday, she says that Manpower still sees 2010 as a "challenging year" for job growth; however the group is cautiously optimistic. "We're seeing signs of life in terms of job growth ... In the last quarter, we are seeing much more activity than we've seen in last 25 months as far as people thinking about re-entering the hiring market," she says. "I think the first and second quarter of the year is going to be very low-level growth and then it's possible for the third and fourth quarter to see more active levels of hiring." The latest Labor Department on unemployment reported the loss of 11,000 jobs in November -- much less than in previous months. It also adjusted its figures for October (from an estimated 190,000 to 111,000) and for September (from 219,000 to 139,000).
December 7, 2009 Copyright 2009© LRP Publications |
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