Stop stepping on employers and they will step up, Mr. President | Brett McMahon | Op Eds | Washington Examiner

Stop stepping on employers and they will step up, Mr. President Brett McMahon Op Eds Washington Examiner

By Brett McMahon

Stop stepping on employers and they will step up, Mr. President

Even for a lifetime politician, President Obama showed remarkable cynicism with his statement today that it’s time for companies to “step up” to increase hiring.

Specifically, he said “the issue here is not uncertainty. The issue is they've got to start placing their bets on America” and that "it's time for companies to step up."

Since the president’s entire workforce experience outside of politics consists only of “community organizing” and law school professorship, here are some thoughts from the real world on why we as employers could increase hiring if his administration would simply get out of the way:

* Rewarding Friends: My company has been a leader in the construction industry for decades because we hire, fire, promote and respect employees and managers based on their merit. Yet one of Obama's first official acts was to sign a “project labor agreement” executive order giving preference to unionized companies for public construction projects, even though 85 percent of private-sector construction employees choose not to join a union.

* Punishing “Enemies:” Now Obama's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has signaled a fight with aircraft maker Boeing, which began construction on a new production facility in South Carolina where the company envisions fewer strikes by a militant union and a generally favorable environment. The government is seeking to block the company’s move, a dangerous precedent that would allow the government to tell businesses what states they can and cannot operate in.

Again, this is a direct threat to the employment not only of those thousands of South Carolina workers, but to the entire American workforce that will be less desirable for international investors choosing where to place their money.

Worse yet, this fight is clearly not about letting employers “step up” to hire good employees, but about a radical agenda within the president’s NLRB to control the flow of capital and jobs.

* Taxing Political Targets: Frankly, no one is shedding tears for the biggest of the big oil companies, but Democrats on Capitol Hill hope to use public sentiment to single out the industry for repeal of economy-wide tax treatments. A top economist has said repeal of just one of the tax credits in question this week would directly threaten an estimated 150,000 jobs—just in 2011.

And those jobs won’t come from Big Oil, which is a political target for Democrats. Those jobs will come from smaller and mid-size companies. As William H. Whitefield, owner of a five-decade family-owned small business in Houston, wrote last year of tax hikes and punitive treatment, “smaller, supporting companies like mine and countless others nationwide would be the first to fall from this economic tourniquet.”

* Structural Threats: Those are just some of the specific attacks on employment by the administration and its friends in Congress. Don’t forget that there are massive structural powderkegs which, despite the president’s learned assurances to the contrary, create uncertainty that no businessperson worth their salt would dare gamble on.

This includes public employee pay, their pensions, healthcare costs (all of which point to higher taxes in the future), the MediCare and Medicaid entitlements crisis, the looming implications of ObamaCare, and outrageous deficits and debt.

All of which is to remind the president that the government does not create jobs, but it most assuredly has the power to kill them, which is precisely what we are seeing.

Here’s a deal for the president: Employers will “step up” to use the Invisible Hand of the market to create more jobs when we no longer feel strangled by the All-Too-Visible Hand of Uncle Sam.

Brett McMahon is vice president of Miller & Long Concrete Construction and a spokesman for the Halt The Assault campaign.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/2011/05/stop-stepping-employers-and-they-will-step-mr-president