Job-focused, but not labor-focused

President Barack Obama appears to be turning his attention to creating jobs.

One might think that, given the state of the American economy and the pain being felt by the American worker, that it would have been a prime focus of the first two years of his administration. I would argue that it was, though he was unsuccessful largely due to an unwillingness to buck the Washington consensus or castigate Republicans, creating a stimulus that was too small and too focused on tax cuts to actually do much good.

So now, as Paul Volcker steps down as an “outside” economic adviser (not exactly sure what that means, unless it refers to the fact that Volcker was basically ignored), Obama is creating a new panel that will be charged with creating jobs.

And at its helm will be General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt.

Mr. Immelt will be chairman of the new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness that Mr. Obama intends to create by executive order. In a statement issued shortly after midnight, Mr. Obama said he wanted the council to “focus its work on finding new ways to encourage the private sector to hire and invest in American competitiveness.”

Immelt said that the panel will include a broad range of economic players, including labor, but it is unclear what role the people who actually do the heavy lifting will have. It seems unlikely, for instance, that the panel or the president will do much if anything to address the serious power imbalance that has developed in recent decades between labor and management or the decline in union membership that has plagued workers for years, an imbalance highlighted in a column by David Leonhardt in yesterday’s Times (and the focus of an upcoming column by me in The Progressive Populist). The “basic structure of the American economy,” which has led to three jobless recoveries in the last 20 years, is “an important factor,” he says — and one made all the more devastating by the imbalance of power between labor and management.

Relative to the situation in most other countries — or in this country for most of the last century — American employers operate with few restraints. Unions have withered, at least in the private sector, and courts have grown friendlier to business. Many companies can now come much closer to setting the terms of their relationship with employees, letting them go when they become a drag on profits and relying on remaining workers or temporary ones when business picks up.
Just consider the main measure of corporate health: profits. In Canada, Japan and most of Europe, corporate profits have still not recovered to precrisis levels. In the United States, profits have more than recovered, rising 12 percent since late 2007.

For corporate America, the Great Recession is over. For the American work force, it’s not.

I’m hoping that Immelt and his panel can help, but unless labor has more than a token seat at the table I just don’t expect much to happen.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet