CEOs agree to help long-term unemployed
Obama assured companies won’t discriminate in hiring
WASHINGTON — Confronting an economic recovery slowed by persistent joblessness, U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday won commitments from nearly 300 companies to reach out to the nearly 4 million Americans who have been jobless for half a year or more.
“It’s a cruel catch-22,” Obama said at a White House event with CEOs, job training groups and advocates for the unemployed. “The longer you’re unemployed, the more unemployable you may seem.”
Obama called that “an illusion” because, he said, such workers are often better qualified and better educated than workers who just recently lost their jobs.
Obama also signed a presidential memo directing the federal government not to discriminate against those long-term unemployed workers in its own hiring practices.
The event and the memo illustrate the types of targeted, non-legislative measures Obama promised to undertake to expand economic opportunity during his state of the union address this week. Obama has declared 2014 a year of action for his administration, but his chances of winning legislative victories are slim in an election year and with a divided Congress.
He renewed his call for Congress to reinstate jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed, noting that it is a way to keep workers financially afloat while they pursue jobs.
The benefits ran out at the end of December. Lawmakers have been debating how to pay for the cost of the benefit and for how long to make it apply.
Among the CEOs at the White House Friday were top executives from eBay, Morgan Stanley, Boeing, Marriott International and McDonalds.
Although the overall national unemployment rate has declined to 6.7 per cent, long-term joblessness in the United States remains a major problem.
The concern is that the longer someone is out of a job, the harder it gets to find a new one. Companies are less likely to hire people who haven’t used their skills in months or wonder why another employer hasn’t already snatched them up.
“Just because you’ve been out of work for a while does not mean that you are not a hard worker,” Obama said.
“Just means you had bad luck or you were in the wrong industry or you lived in a region of the country that’s catching up a little slower than others in the recovery.”
With that concern in mind, the Obama administration has been working for months to exact commitments from companies to ensure their hiring practices don’t discriminate against long-term jobseekers.