Back to Work - Bill Clinton [73]
35. Fill the three million jobs that are already open faster. Even though unemployment is high, posted job openings are being filled only half as fast as in previous postrecession economies. Part of the reason is that employers want particular skills applicants don’t have. To speed up hiring, Michael Thurmond, former labor commissioner of Georgia, offered employers the money to train workers on-site. Employers don’t pay payroll taxes or benefits during the training period, and they get the chance to fully evaluate people before they’re hired. The Georgia Work$ system helps everyone. People get hired more quickly and spend less time on unemployment benefits. The federal government should ensure that every state offers this option. We can fill open jobs faster. President Obama embraced this idea in his American Jobs Act, and it should have bipartisan appeal.
36. Provide an extra incentive to hire people who’ve been out of work more than six months. More and more news reports indicate that employers, who can be very choosy in hiring in this environment, are reluctant to hire, sometimes even to interview, people who’ve been out of work more than six months. I think that’s understandable but still a mistake. Many of the longer-term unemployed are hardworking, reliable people who spent months trying to find jobs they know how to do or jobs paying close to what they used to make. To encourage employers to give them a chance, we should give them, in addition to whatever is available for all new hires, a longer payroll-tax holiday, one month for every month beyond six months a new hire was unemployed. President Obama’s plan has a different and probably better idea: $8 billion to fund a tax credit to businesses that hire the long-term unemployed.
37. Give employers an incentive not to lay off workers in the first place. One reason the German unemployment rate is 2 percent lower than ours is that in tough times, employers and employees can agree to reduce everyone’s hours and pay in a system called Kurzarbeit, “short work.” The government encourages this instead of layoffs by paying the employee 60 percent of his or her lost wages. It’s cheaper than full unemployment payments, keeps skilled workforces intact, and helps the economy recover. We should adopt a version of it. Earlier in this book, I told the story of Nucor steel and the benefits of its no-layoff policy. The president’s plan provides $49 billion in expanded unemployment benefits, with the provision that some of it can be used to test the idea in areas where it’s most likely to work. I’m convinced this kind of system would increase our long-term productivity and keep unemployment lower. We should have instituted it years ago.
38. “Insource” jobs we’ve been outsourcing. At the Clinton Global Initiative America meeting on the U.S. economy, in June 2011, one of the most impressive commitments to create jobs was made by Onshore Technology Services. Onshore was founded in 2006 to retrain underemployed and dislocated workers in information technology. The company offers business customers the chance to reduce their IT costs 25 to 35 percent without sending the work offshore. Onshore has committed to develop an operations center with a thousand employees in Joplin, Missouri, to help it recover from the tornado damage, and to create twelve thousand jobs throughout rural America. We need more of these efforts and should encourage them with support from the Department of Commerce, which could identify potential corporate customers for insourcing, and from the SBA, which could help with initial capital.
39. To support the insourcing movement, we should increase the number of empowerment zones and expand the reach of the New Markets Initiative. These two initiatives, which