Jobs News

The Employment Situation in January

Today’s employment report provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. It is critical that we continue the economic policies that are helping us to dig our way out of the deep hole that was caused by the recession that began at the end of 2007. Most importantly, we need to extend the payroll tax cut and continue to provide emergency unemployment benefits through the end of this year, and take the additional steps that President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address to create an economy built to last.

The unemployment rate fell 0.2 percentage point to 8.3%, from a high of 10% in October 2009. The drop in unemployment over the month was entirely due to employment growth, as the labor force participation rate remained constant, once new population weights are taken into account.  The unemployment rate has fallen by 0.8 percentage point in the last 12 months. Private sector payrolls increased by 257,000 jobs and overall payroll employment rose by 243,000 jobs in January. Despite adverse shocks that have created headwinds for economic growth, the economy has added private sector jobs for 23 straight months, for a total of 3.7 million payroll jobs over that period. In the last 12 months, 2.2 million private sector jobs were added on net.  Nonetheless, we need faster growth to put more Americans back to work.

Sectors with net job increases in December included professional and business services (+70,000), manufacturing (+50,000), leisure and hospitality (+44,000), health care and social assistance (+29,700), and construction (+21,000).  Government lost 14,000 jobs.

The monthly employment and unemployment numbers can be volatile, and employment estimates can be subject to substantial revision. Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report; nevertheless, the trend in job market indicators over recent months is an encouraging sign.

A Legislative Agenda to Startup America

Today, Startup America celebrates its first birthday, and President Obama is sending Congress a set of proposals to help boost the startups and small businesses that create so many jobs in this country.

President Obama has already cut taxes for businesses 17 times. Now, he's asking lawmakers to create four new tax cuts. He's proposing a new 10 percent income tax credit on new payroll for small businesses; a permanent extension of a tax cut he signed in 2010 that eliminates taxes on capital gains in key investments for small businesses; a doubling of the amount that entrepreneurs can deduct from their taxes for start-up expenses, and a 100 percent extension of first-year depreciation of qualified property for one year.

To help businesses find more investors, the President is calling for a national framework that allows entrepreneurs to raise money through "crowdfunding." Currently, the most a small business can raise through a round of "Regulation A" mini-funding is $5 million -- but President Obama wants to boost that limit to $50 million, coupled with strong protections for investors. He's calling for changes in how securities laws and regulations are phased in for small companies in their first year after going public. And the President wants to increase the Small Business Investment Company program to to allow for up to $4 billion in annual support.

President Obama is also calling on Congress to relieve the backlog of immigrant visas. To do that, he wants lawmakers to eliminate the country-specific caps for certain immigrant visas to attract more high skilled foreign workers, particularly entrepreneurs.

To learn more about all these proposals, go here.

Celebrating Startups in the State of the Union

Ed note: In honor of the one year anniversary of Startup America, we invited Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram, to contribute a post to WhiteHouse.gov. Instagram is the fastest growing social mobile startup in the U.S. today, and exemplifies President Obama's belief that "entrepreneurs embody the promise of America: the idea that if you have a good idea and are willing to work hard and see it through, you can succeed in this country. And in fulfilling this promise, entrepreneurs also play a critical role in expanding our economy and creating jobs." Mr. Krieger moved from Brazil to California to attend Stanford University, where he studied computer science and cognitive science. In 2010, he and a partner founded Instagram, which now employs a talented, growing team of designers and engineers. After graduation, Mr. Krieger worked for a year on his student F-1 visa, later applying for and receiving an H-1B visa as a high-skill worker. Mr. Krieger wants to permanently stay in the U.S. and has applied for a green card.

I was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and from an early age was interested in technology and engineering. When I came to the United States in 2004 to attend university at Stanford, I was instantly inspired by the stories and advice from startup leaders in Silicon Valley and beyond, who had endeavoured to create new opportunities and improve lives around the world. I was drawn to the idea of one day helping to create a startup, and last year, I was fortunate to be given the chance. In May of 2010, I joined Kevin Systrom, my co-founder, and we created Instagram, a mobile social network that today has over 15 million users. What began as a small, two-person startup working out of a pier in San Francisco has grown to a dozen employees, and our plan is to at least double that this year. There are few better sights than walking into an office full of talented, hard-working folks, working together to build a great company from the ground up.

Secretary Shinseki to the Private Sector: Hire our Veterans

Ed note: This was originally posted on the VA's blog, VAntage

This week, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki met with National Franchise business leaders in Atlanta to promote Veteran employment. The effort was the part of the Obama Administration’s Joining Forces Initiative, which aims for a simple yet important goal: To connect our Veterans and their families with meaningful employment.

Secretary Shinseki talked about a win for everyone involved; a win for employers that receive great, disciplined, and hardworking employees and Veterans, who have the ability to achieve their goals out of uniform. 

It’s all part of a plan to support Veterans, as the President said in the State of the Union, “so that America is as strong as those who defend her.”

The International Franchise Association has pledged to hire and recruit 75,000 Veterans and their spouses by 2014. With the example they set, I hope it’s a trend that continues across America.

Secretary Shinseki has made a strong case for Veterans in the workplace. “They make exceptional employees and business leaders,” he told the collection of business leaders in Atlanta. “Let’s hire them. Let’s find them work.”

Vice President Biden: "America Is Coming Back"

Vice President Joe Biden speaks at Albany Engineered Composites during event on manufacturing in Rochester, NH, Jan 26, 2012. (Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

Yesterday, Vice President Biden visited Rochester, New Hampshire to highlight the Administration’s plan to help businesses bring manufacturing jobs back to America. He made one central message clear: “America is coming back.”

As the Vice President emphasized, the policies the Obama Administration has put in place in its first three years are beginning to pay off—especially in manufacturing. The economy added 334,000 manufacturing jobs in the last two years, making it the strongest period of manufacturing job growth since the late 1990s. And now, instead of hearing about outsourcing, we’re finally starting to hear about insourcing as more and more companies realize that it makes real business sense to bring jobs back to America. 

Manufacturers are coming back because, while costs in China are rising rapidly, “American workers are the most productive workers in the world,” the Vice President said. And to reinforce that advantage, we need more partnerships between businesses and community colleges to train workers with the specialized skills employers need. 

Vice President Biden had the opportunity to see such a partnership in action in New Hampshire yesterday—a partnership that is reviving advanced manufacturing and bringing jobs back to the state. 

Video: Meet Some of the People Who Joined Michelle Obama for the State of the Union

Back in December, thousands of Americans shared their stories about the impact that losing $40 per paycheck would have on them, and on their families, if Congress did not pass the payroll tax cut.

Responses poured in from across the country, and these stories made a difference: Congress passed and President Obama signed a two-month extension of the payroll tax cut for middle class families before it expired at the end of 2011. 

Amber Morris from Virginia Beach, Virginia was one of the people who wrote in to say what losing $40 per paycheck would mean to her, and on Tuesday night she joined First Lady Michelle Obama for the President’s State of the Union Address. Amber was selected to represent the tens of thousands of Americans who made their voices heard during the debate.  

Everything You Need to Know About the President's Blueprint for Manufacturing

President Barack Obama looks at an agricultural auger while touring Conveyer Engineering and Manufacturing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Jan. 25, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Since the end of 2009, business investment has grown by a rate of 18 percent, and exports have increased by 32 percent -- for a total of $2 trillion.

That's good news for American manufacturing, which has added 334,000 jobs in the past two years.

Last night, in the State of the Union, President Obama said that his Blueprint for an America that lasts begins with manufacturing. He talked about the revival of the American auto industry and said that what is happening in Detroit can happen in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, or Raleigh.

To achieve that vision, the President focused on three key themes. 

State of the Union Deep Dive

Americans who watched an online broadcast of President Obama's 2012 State of the Union address saw something a little different: a side by side display of charts, graphs and other visual representations of why the President's policies are so important for our country and our economy. You can see the slides here, or download them at slideshare

Celebrating Our Veterans With “Apps for Heroes”

Last Wednesday, we joined Dr. Jill Biden at the Code for America headquarters, a non-profit startup that has attracted dozens of civic-minded software developers spending a year building new products and services – powered, in part, by open government data – to improve the lives of everyday Americans.

Dr. Biden celebrated the convening efforts of Code and 10 apps developed by the private sector to improve the employment prospects for our Nation’s heroes – from apps that help veterans build new skills or a professional network, to a personalized list of open job postings. We observed the results of LinkedIn’s “Veterans Hackday” – two of the 44 apps built over a weekend; a collaboration between two tech companies that had never worked together before – Jibe and KMS Software – to deliver an almost-paperless approach to qualify for eligible tax credits; and the impressive work of a veteran entrepreneur, Fidelis, focused on the military to civilian transition.

We saw these and other “Apps for Heroes” because Code for America made a commitment last August in response to the President’s call to action. We joined Code on this mission and engaged a broader voluntary collaborative of tech firms already active in the employment and training online market. They didn’t ask us for money. Rather, we brainstormed how government data, if released in a people-and-computer-friendly format, could serve as “rocket fuel” for their apps.

And then we went to work.

Inspired by President Obama’s Open Government Initiative and guided by the U.S. National Action Plan, we identified at least three areas where we might open up data that had previously been either in an inaccessible format, organized in a fragmented way, or largely unknown to the developer community:

1. Military Service Information:  Veterans today collect a form – the DD-214 – that captures their military “resume”; while it can be electronically accessed, the data within the form is protected and in a form that isn’t accessible for a computer to read. Building on the momentum of VA’s initiative, Dr. Levin expanded their “Blue Button” service - which enables a veteran to safely and securely download their personal health data in computer-friendly form - to include a veteran’s service history, training, and credentials. Launched just in the beginning of December, over 60,000 veterans have already downloaded a “Blue Button” file that can be shared with the products and service as they see fit, like the apps for heroes we saw last week.
2. Military Skills Translator:  The Department of Labor actively supports a non-profit, the O*Net center, to maintain a growing portfolio of tools and data sets that are freely available to developers or anyone for that matter.  The problem was that very few of the developers we engaged over the past several months were even aware of this resource.  When we showed them what we had they immediately went to work on “translating” military experience into skills that are relevant for their existing products and services.
3. Job Postings from Employers Seeking Veterans:  President Obama launched the“Veterans Job Bank” last November, which provides access to hundreds of thousands of job postings from employers actively committed to hiring veterans. Built on an open standard, the “JobPosting” schema – endorsed by a coalition of search engines (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) through the schema.org community – empowers any employer to ensure its job postings are discoverable by the Job Bank.  The big idea is that instead of requiring every employer to update a centralized database, we can dynamically “search” for veteran-committed jobs.  Its faster, cheaper, and more reliable way to connect employers to talent. The Job Bank itself is accessible at the National Resource Directory and its search widget, built in an effort to support developers has offered an API that delivers search results straight to the app.  

Finally, I thought to share the power of Open Innovation @ Internet speed. At a Summer Jobs + event last Tuesday, Twilio CEO, Jeff Lawson challenged the Twilio developer community to build an “App for Heroes.” In about an hour – from concept to go-live – developer Tony Webster built HeroJobs.org, a text messaging app that sends job alerts to veterans every morning based on their preferences, experience, and zip code.

We were humbled and honored that so many innovative firms volunteered their time and effort to incorporate these – and other open government data sets – as an important ingredient for their innovate employment or training support service. Our visit inspired us to push even harder to release government data, celebrate its use, and to engage our veterans directly to ensure they have the support they need in this important life transition.

Aneesh Chopra is U.S. Chief Technology Officer and Peter Levin is Chief Technology Officer and Senior Advisor to the Secretary, Department of Veterans Affairs