President Obama's Jobs Commission - Outsourcers and Masters of the Universe

President Obama has named the members of his "Council on Jobs and Competitiveness" headed by GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt. Emptywheel took a whack at Immelt and his outsourcing to China last month here. Obviously Immelt knows how to create jobs, just not so sure he knows how to create jobs in the USA that can allow the US unemployed to earn a living wage.

And really, that is my biggest complaint over all with the "Council" appointed by President Obama. There are two, count'em, two, persons representing workers on this council, Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO and Joseph T. Hansen, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. Besides Trumka and Hansen, the other non-CEOs on the Council are Laura D'Andrea Tyson, President Clinton's Economic Adviser and John Doerr, senior partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Neither Tyson nor Doerr can be said to be particularly sympathetic or empathetic to workers, much less the 25 to 30 million un and underemployed.

The rest of the members represent the CEOs of the world:

ADP Jobs Report for July

Yesterday, I wrote about the idiocy of the cheerleaders who keep making speeches about how wonderful everything is in the economy so they're not going to do anything different. Then today, ADP released their Jobs Report on private sector job creation for July 2010.

Private-sector employers added jobs for the sixth month in a row in July, according to a report by payroll processing firm Automatic Data Processing (ADP). ADP said private-sector employers added 42,000 jobs to their payrolls during the month, following an upwardly revised 19,000 increase in June.

Forty-two thousand jobs sounds good right?. Well, when you consider the economy needs to add 100K to 150K jobs each month just to absorb all the new folks coming in, no it doesn't sound all that good.

Then you combine this with a second report out early today (from the same CNN story linked above)

In a separate report, planned job cuts rose for a third straight month in July, fueled by continued weakness in the government and non-profit sector, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. Employers announced plans to eliminate about 42,000 jobs last month, Challenger said. That was up 6% from June, when job cuts rose to 39,000.

Trying to Make Sense of it All

Where to begin? Wednesdays seem to have a dearth of stories on Jobs, Unemployment, Underemployment and all the various ramifications of these.

But Thursday seem to bring an overabundance of articles on these topics.

First off was this little gem of a story from the AP via MSNBC on an Indian IT firm outsourcing Call Center operations to a prison. I'm just not real sure how to deal with these issues (outsourcing in general and outsourcing to prisons in particular) without sounding like a racist or xenophobe. So, we'll set this aside for a while and return to it on a later day.

Then there's the Weekly Job Report. This from Reuters probably offers what I consider the best presentation (Best being most true to reality, that is):

The number of U.S. workers filing for jobless benefits fell only slightly last week, highlighting the challenges facing the labor market, while import prices pointed to tame inflation, according to government data released on Thursday.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits slipped 4,000 to a seasonally adjusted 444,000, the Labor Department said, though the number was still slightly above the 440,000 expected by analysts in a Reuters poll. The prior week's figure was revised up to 448,000.