Obama invited more than 130 leaders from business, labor, academia, nonprofits and local government to talk about the issue that casts a shadow over the country -- and his approval ratings. One in 10 Americans is unemployed. The economy still is shedding jobs -- and economists expect that trend will continue Friday when the government announces new figures.
"I am not interested in taking a wait-and-see approach when it comes to creating jobs," Obama said in welcoming the group to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. "What I'm interested in is taking action right now to help businesses create jobs right now, in the near term.
"What people are going through every day is heartbreaking," Obama said. But, he added, "we are still the most stable country in the world."
The president acknowledged there was skepticism about whether the summit would produce any tangible results. He also noted that little money is available because of the federal budget deficit. Obama will visit Allentown, Pa. -- the namesake of Billy Joel's ode to the crumbling manufacturing sector -- and will make a speech about his job-creation proposals Tuesday.
J. Scott Applewhite, AP
President Barack Obama, accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden, opens the Jobs and Economic Growth Forum on Thursday.
In wrapping up the afternoon summit, he said proposals included allowing tax credits for job creation, allocating money for local governments and infrastructure programs, and promoting "green" businesses that sell environmentally sensitive products. He said he was "open to every demonstrably good idea."
Conservatives noted that no Republican lawmakers were on the list of attendees, and some business groups that have clashed with him on other issues were left off the list -- including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business.
"The groups that represent large numbers of the actual job creators are not involved, presumably because the White House doesn't want to hear what they have to say," said James Sherk, Bradley Fellow in Labor Policy at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation.
Republicans staged their own jobs events Thursday. House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio held a roundtable with economists.
Boehner spokesman Mike Steel said Democratic proposals making unionizing easier, revamping health care and changing energy laws would make the job situation even worse. Steel said the lineup of Obama summit attendees seemed designed to elicit agreement with the president, not to elicit a broad cross-section of ideas.
"On the whole, it seems to be a group that won't tell the administration what it doesn't want to hear: that it's the administration and Washington Democrats' own agenda that is making it more difficult for small businesses to create jobs," Steel said.
In addition to labor leaders, economists and think-tank sorts, the attendees included business leaders from AT&T (where 12,000 jobs were cut a year ago and about 4,600 this year), Boeing Co. (where 6,212 net jobs have been eliminated since November 2008), AstraZeneca (6,000 cuts this year and 1,400 last year), American Airlines (which laid off 6,800 last summer and more workers in October), Home Depot (which announced 7,000 jobs cuts in January), Dow (which cut 5,000 last December), U.S. Steel (3,500 cuts in North America), Xerox (3,000 jobs cut this year), Disney (which eliminated 1,900 jobs in the first quarter), and Dow Corning Corp. (which cut 800 workers globally earlier this year).
"This administration, like the previous administration, is more interested in helping CEOs, bankers and the financial sector rather than the man on the street," said Rodney D. Green, chairman of the economics department at Howard University, who did not attend.
Green said many of the companies involved are participating because they want federal subsidies.
Jarrod Erpelding, spokesman for Dow Corning, said his company would like to see more federal tax credits for alternative energy use. But the reason CEO Stephanie Burns was part of the summit, he said, was to promote the creation of "green collar" jobs. He said Dow Corning is investing $5 billion over five years to expand production of polysilicone, which is used in solar energy cells. At one plant, 500 jobs already have been added.
Sherk, from the Heritage Foundation, said the jobs problem in the country isn't layoffs, but a lack of new job creation. As the number of workers expands, the economy needs to create 125,000 new jobs each month just to keep up. Since the recession began, the rate of layoffs has increased 15 percent, but the reduction in new jobs created has been even greater -- 25 percent, he said. The median time for an unemployed worker to find a new job has jumped from about 8.5 weeks to 18.7 weeks, he said.
But as the summit opened, Vice President Joe Biden focused on figures from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which said as many as 1.6 million jobs were created by the stimulus package passed earlier this year.
An unvarnished and telling moment of the summit came as Carol Browner, assistant to the president for energy and climate-change policy, waited for participants to filter in to a session on "green" jobs. "How's your business?" she asked the first arrival, Ronald Saxton of Jeld-Wen, which makes energy-efficient windows.
"Not very good," he replied.
