From the LA TImes
Obama's job-creation panel includes job-cutting executives
In another public demonstration of concern about the struggling economy, President Obama will meet in Pittsburgh on Tuesday with the business and labor leaders he has chosen to counsel him on job creation.
But many of the chief executives have cut American jobs and adopted tactics that weaken organized labor — even as their businesses post record profits.
More below the squiggle
These are advisors on job creation in the US?
Just days before the president appointed Kenneth I. Chenault, chairman and chief executive of American Express, to the council, the company announced a massive restructuring that closed a facility in North Carolina and eliminated 550 jobs, or about 1% of the company's workforce. At the same time, American Express announced it had made $1.1 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010, up 48% from the same period the previous year.
Xerox, whose chief executive, Ursula Burns, sits on the board, has cut 4,500 jobs in the first six months of 2011.
Jim McNerney, chief executive of Boeing, shrank the company's California operations because of the end of the space shuttle program and defense cutbacks. In January, Boeing said it was cutting 1,100 U.S. jobs, including 900 in Long Beach, and has since announced further cuts in Alabama and Kansas, while adding jobs elsewhere. At the same time, Boeing reported that profits rose 20%, to $941 billion in the
Some companies have been cutting jobs for years. Eastman Kodak, whose chief executive, Antonio M. Perez, is a member of the council, has completed a number of layoffs at its Rochester, N.Y., manufacturing facilities. Between 2004 and 2011, Kodak's Rochester workforce shrank by 9,200 to 7,100.
Opposition Voices
"Nobody should expect this group to come up with innovative ways of investing in the American workforce and generating not only more jobs but higher wages," said Robert Reich, who was Labor secretary during the Clinton administration. "That's just not what these big companies do."
"They call it the jobs and competitiveness committee, but when they mean by competitiveness is massive concessions being imposed on working people," said Chris Townsend, political action director of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, which represents 3,500 General Electric workers.
Townsend says General Electric (aka Jeffrey Immelt) has closed 31 U.S. locations and cut 22,000 jobs in the last four years. It has cut wages of nonunion workers and, in the most recent union contract, required employees to pay higher deductibles for health insurance and eradicated pensions for new employees.
"We think it speaks of incredibly poor judgment on the part of the White House to select the members of the panel that they've selected and try to describe it somehow as a job creation panel," he said.
Dissonance
President: "Pass this bill now"
Durbin: "We don't have the votes in the Senate"
Pelosi: "When the ... unemployment rate is high, it's hard for the incumbent to win. I remind you though, we're not the incumbent. The Republicans are the incumbent." Dems Must Dramatize GOP Jobs Blockade (Wait, what?)
Who is in charge of this messaging? Axelrod? Plouffe? Daley? Schumer? Wasserman-Shultz?
For those enamored of the "obstructionism" meme, according to Gallup, the electorate is not buying it...see It's not just a bipartisanship fail - it's an obstructionism fail too
The electorate requires a clear and strong message on the economy and jobs. Maybe the WH should take a lesson from OWS and convene an assembly?
Crap, we should have figured this out by now...