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President Obama just affixed his signature to the JOBS Act in a public signing ceremony you may have caught on CNN. The Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, which passed both houses with bipartisan support, sounds like a win for everyone: It clears away red tape and makes it easier for small businesses to raise money [...]
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Report: Private Sector Adds 209,000 Jobs in March
The private sector added 209,000 jobs in March, according to an analysis from the payroll services firm ADP. The report also noted that the economy added 23,000 more jobs in the first two months of 2012 than ADP had previously estimated. The news is ahead of Friday’s employment situation report, when the Labor Department will [...]
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With JOBS Act Approved, SeedVo.com Incorporates and Seeks Partnerships After Launching New Website for Entrepreneurs and Investors
227,000 New Jobs Is Good. But Has the Economy Reached Escape Velocity?
Economy watchers talk often about the economic recoveries requiring a “virtuous circle.” In such a scenario, job growth leads to higher wages and increased consumer demand, which in turn lead to more job growth. Does the Labor Departments announcement that the U.S. economy added 227,000 new jobs mean we’ve reached such a point?
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Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Don’t Derail Transportation Jobs
Everyday, millions of unemployed Americans anxiously wait for their chance to get back to work. And as gas prices skyrocket, millions more are desperately searching for affordable, reliable ways to get to their jobs each day.
Congress has a chance right now to pass a transportation bill that will do more to get Americans back to work than just about anything else they’ve proposed. They have a chance to make us all safer on our daily commutes, and to protect our lungs from the pollution that causes asthma and heart disease and leads to millions of dollars in unnecessary health care costs each year. They have a chance to give us better transit choices that will make our lives easier.
America’s transportation system is in desperate need of repair. Our bridges and roads are crumbling beneath us. In fact, roughly one out of every four bridges in this country is not safe. The last thing we need is for our aging infrastructure to cause a disaster — we haven’t forgotten the devastation of the bridge collapse in Minnesota a few years ago — an accident that could have been prevented.
We all know we have work to do to make sure our roads, bridges, rails and buses are safe and efficient. But if we do the job right, we can lift people out of poverty and slash pollution while we’re at it.
As we rebuild and repair our transportation system, we need to make sure that all Americans have access to the jobs that are created. That’s why Green for All has designed a program that creates pathways to the middle class by helping people gain valuable construction training and experience. By encouraging the hiring of local workers for transportation projects, the Construction Careers Demonstration Program keeps dollars close to home and helps revitalize communities. It also helps rebuild the middle class by creating pathways to good careers. Apprenticeships give new workers a foothold in the industry and a chance to learn new skills. The program also creates opportunities for Americans that need them most — including young people, veterans and homemakers re-entering the workforce. It also encourages using small local businesses to do contract work whenever possible. Senator Gillibrand (D-NY) has worked to include the Construction Careers program as part of the Senate transportation bill — provisions that will go a long way towards reviving our communities.
But by and large, our elected officials have failed to produce a bill that will do anything but fill the coffers of the oil industry. They’ve dropped the Safe Routes to School program — designed to help communities that want their kids to bike and walk without fear of being hit by cars. They’ve gutted funding for public transit like rail and buses, making it harder for people to find reliable, cost-effective ways to get to their jobs.
If Congress is serious about putting Americans back to work — if they’re serious about reviving communities, keeping our roads and bridges safe, and protecting our kids and our health — they’ll pass a transportation bill that America needs now. If they want joblessness to keep climbing, small businesses and neighborhoods to wither, traffic accidents to rise, and more and more kids to struggle with asthma, they’ll keep on doing what they’ve been doing.
We need our representatives to stand with the American people — not Big Oil — and make transportation choices that create safer, healthier, communities and pathways into middle class jobs. Tell your representative that you want a smart transportation bill that supports hardworking Americans, not Big Oil.
Scott Bittle: The Iceman Goeth: Politicians Ignore the Biggest Threat to American Jobs
As the presidential candidates spout on about jobs and the economy, I sometimes wish I could put my late grandfather on the stage during the debates. Not just because he had a low tolerance for blather, although he did, and I think the politicians would find his comments, let’s say, bracing. The real reason is that his experience has more relevance to the jobs debate than most of what the politicians are talking about.
My grandfather had a job that doesn’t even exist anymore. In fact, most people may never have heard of it (except via Eugene O’Neill). He was an “iceman,” delivering big blocks of ice to homes and businesses in the era before refrigeration. Back then, if you wanted to keep things cold, you kept your food in an insulated icebox (essentially a big cooler). Ice men like my grandfather were daily visitors, just like the milkman or the paper carrier.
Eventually technology came out with something better, but my grandfather knew that wasn’t necessarily going to be better for him. As my father used to tell it, the family was once invited to dinner during the 1930s; a dinner that ended with ice cream out of a refrigerator. An electric refrigerator.
My grandfather didn’t say anything, but there was no way in hell he was going to eat that demon dessert, no matter how hard my grandmother kicked him under the table. Finally, when the hostess’ back was turned, she switched dishes, putting her empty one in front of grandfather and eating the second one herself.
That kind of defiance wasn’t going to hold back the refrigerator, any more than John Henry could hold off the steam hammer. By the 1950s, 80 percent of American households had refrigerators, and my grandfather was out of the ice business and back to his farm.
My grandfather was an example of the “creative destruction” of jobs that economists (and lately presidential candidates) embrace. Technology both creates and destroys jobs, usually at the same time, and ideally because a superior product came along. Refrigerators were better than iceboxes. Eventually even my grandfather admitted it. If you look at the overall economy, the loss of ice routes was more than made up by new jobs making refrigerators.
The key word in creative destruction, however, is “creative.” Now we’re living in another time not unlike the 1930s, with a jobs crisis that’s partly a massive failure of financial markets and partly a huge technological shift in the nature of work. There’s no question the Great Recession slammed the global economy. But one reason why the jobs market has been so slow to recover is that technology is enabling us to do more work with fewer people — or with people anywhere around the world.
Ah, but your grandfather was a blue-collar worker, you may say. Those kinds of jobs are begging to be automated. If he’d gone to college, that would have been a different story.
And that’s very true: if my grandfather had gone to college he probably wouldn’t have been an ice man, or a farmer. But an education isn’t the guaranteed haven from technological change it used to be. The working assumption that most people have — that technology favors the smart, the creative, and the well-educated — may not hold up any more.
Figure it this way: it’s about the difference between repetitive tasks and those that require analysis. If you’re working on an assembly line, picking vegetables or handling deposits and withdrawals over a bank counter, a machine might do your job better. If you’re in charge of making sure those jobs get done, or marketing them, then a computer may help you, but it can’t do the job for you.
Unfortunately, the definition of “repetitive” is going to keep shifting. “E-discovery” software, which can sort through email and documents looking for suspicious patterns, is already taking on a job traditionally done by paralegals and junior associates in law forms. IBM’s “Watson” computer, which can respond to questions well enough to play “Jeopardy,” is really designed to take over tasks from nurses and doctors, like taking medical histories. But you’ll still need a human being to write a brief, argue in court, or conduct your surgery.
The jobs crisis is the first priority for most Americans, and rightly so. If you don’t have a decent job in America, your entire life can unravel. Yet in the early stages of a crucial presidential campaign, we’re spending far too much time asking the wrong questions: can we “hold onto” the jobs we have? Should we cut taxes? Does a college education pay off?
What we really need to do — and what our political candidates better start doing — is talk about what kind of jobs technology is likely to create, and what kind it destroys, and how our national policy can get ahead of that curve. The economy will work these issues out in the long run, but it’ll be a lot less ugly if we actually start planning for the changes we know are coming. Anything else is like refusing to eat the ice cream from the refrigerator: a stand that doesn’t change a thing.
“Made-In-The-USA” Call Center Firm Will Join Front Row Motorsports at the Daytona 500 to Drive American Jobs
Visit StreetInsider.com at http://www.streetinsider.com/Press+Releases/%E2%80%9CMade-In-The-USA%E2%80%9D+Call+Center+Firm+Will+Join+Front+Row+Motorsports+at+the+Daytona+500+to+Drive+American+Jobs/7213730.html for the full story.
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