With jobless rates at record levels, President Obama announced this week that he will hold a White House jobs summit in December to tackle the crisis.
Among those who will huddle with him are union leaders, economists and business representatives.
“As I’ve said from the start of this crisis, hiring often takes time to catch up to economic growth. And given the magnitude of the economic turmoil that we’ve experienced, employers are reluctant to hire,” the president said.
Government figures indicate that companies are continuing to slash hundreds of thousands of jobs each month and that, officially, there are 15 million unemployed.
“Meanwhile,” Obama declared, “millions of Americans, our friends, our neighbors, our family members, are desperately searching for jobs. This is one of the great challenges that remains in our economy, a challenge my administration is absolutely determined to meet.”
The president said, “We have an obligation to consider every additional responsible step that we can to encourage and accelerate job creation.”
Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future, a think tank that supports labor and progressive causes, hailed the idea of the summit and said, “The summit should consider both immediate and long term strategies. Next year, Congress should act to create jobs immediately – creating urban and green jobs corps to put young people back to work, aiding states and localities to forestall layoffs of police and teachers, expanding investments in new energy, in retrofitting buildings, in transport and infrastructure to boost economy over the course of the next two years.”
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dcjohn/ / CC BY 2.0
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