Orange County Register

 President Barack Obama has announced that he would be holding a White House summit on jobs creation. As has been widely reported, many indicators suggest that the economy is on the rebound – with the exception of joblessness. The national unemployment rate in now the double digits and Orange County’s is hovering just under 10 percent.

The layoffs keep coming here – this week CHOC announced it would let go of 42 people and a local fireplace manufacturer said it would reduce its workforce by 71 jobs.

“Given the magnitude of the economic turmoil that we’ve experienced, employers are reluctant to hire,” Obama said. “Meanwhile, 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 that my administration is absolutely determined to meet.”

So Obama is inviting executives, labor leaders, small business owners and economists in for a talk on how to create more jobs. Sounds like he’s got a lot of suits coming in, but not the people who are actually affected by this problem: those people who are out of work.

What do you — “our friends, our neighbors, our family members” — think? If you were invited to the White House to offer suggestions to the president on getting people back to work, what would you suggest?

Please, no haters. Let’s try to keep this discussion away from the political and keep it on polite, practical terms.

Like the groundhog signaling spring, labor experts are looking at a surge in the hiring of recruiters as hope that there will soon be more jobs. The AP reports out of Washington that job openings are at record lows, with small businesses particularly hurt. But according to the story:

Still, there are some pockets of hiring as demand for information technology and sales professionals grows, according to government reports and job search Web sites. And there are signs that companies are adding more human resources personnel, which could signal more hiring down the road.

“We’ve seen a real spike in the hiring of contract recruiters,” said Phil Haynes, managing director of AllianceQ, an employers’ association that includes companies such as Starbucks Corp., Bank of America Corp. and Intuit Inc. “The recruiters come before the jobs.”

Meanwhile, back in California, executives report that they won’t be hiring anytime soon and some even see more layoffs. The Reg’s Mary Ann Milbourn has the story over on Handling Hard Times.

Some job seekers are finding one more nervewracking hurdle to leap when applying for work: prospective employers are requiring a credit check.

I first learned about this when I wrote a story about Dwain Gallo for a Labor Day series I did. Dwain, a laid-off salesman now unemployed for over a year, applied for two jobs and checked the box on the application that asked if they could run his name through a credit agency. He felt it wasn’t fair, but hey, he was desperate and he didn’t want to hurt his chances at getting the gig.

“If you have credit problems, they’re equating it with a bad employee,” Dwain said. “In this recession, if you’re out of work, who hasn’t fallen behind on payments?”

State law doesn’t bar employers from running a credit check on a job-seeker, as long as the company provides written notice and offers the prospective employee a copy of the report. Additionally, if the company decides against hiring the applicant based on the credit report, it must inform him of that reason.

But when a Norwalk assemblyman tried to change the law recently, he was shot down by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Assemblyman Tony Mendoza, a Democrat, won approval for his bill (AB 943) that would have barred employers from looking at their prospective hires’ credit history. But Schwarzenegger vetoed it last month, siding with the California Chamber of Commerce, which argued that the bill added regulations to companies already struggling in a bad economy. Read the Chamber’s history and defense of their opposition here.

Well, we haven’t seen the end of this issue.

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A sobering jobs report this morning.

The Reg’s Mary Ann Milbourn reports that the U.S. unemployment rate hit a 26-year high — 10.2 percent.

But it’s worse than that. If you count people who have settled for part-time work and those who have given up looking for a job, the rate is 17.5 percent.  This is the largest number of unemployed Americans since April 1983.

And Orange County’s neighbors are particulary hard hit. An interesting post over on The Business Insider shows a crunching of job openings via monster.com. Los Angeles was named No. 1 for the hardest city to find a job. San Diego was No. 7.

Lost in all the good news reporting on Ford’s strong earnings report yesterday was this little nugget: despite the uptick in sales and revenues, the automotive company doesn’t plan to hire any new workers. That’s just another sign that although the economy may be recovering, the unemployment rate is still high.

The Los Angeles Times reports that that wasn’t lost on President Obama, who met with business leaders and his own economic aides yesterday. Obama called for “bold, innovative action” on the jobs issue.

“Having brought the economy back from the brink, the question is how are we going to make sure that people are getting back to work and able to support their families,” Obama said.

The government releases the monthly unemployment figures on Friday.

Did you see this poll in your Sunday paper?  Parade Magazine did a survey on how the Great Recession has affected people.

 Sixty-nine percent of the respondents reported that they have lost a job, suffered a reduction in pay, or know someone who has experienced one of those. Eighty percent said they’ve been “forced to do more with less.”

Seems the concept of the American Dream has changed for people, too, and they are backing away from the definition that calls for lots of stuff and a McMansion on a sunny suburban lot.  Some 67 percent of the respondents said they strongly believe that “it’s about the opportunity to achieve through education and hard work” and 60 percent said “it’s the liberty to do what we want.”

Take the poll here.