This week marked another victory for President-elect Donald Trump and his partnership with the American worker.
Two companies, Sprint, the wireless provider, and OneWeb, a satellite internet provider startup — both controlled by SoftBank founder and Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son — announced that they will be adding thousands of jobs here in the US.
Sprint will be moving 5,000 jobs to these shores; OneWeb will create 3,000 new jobs. Trump, the businessman, brokered the deal.
The news comes a few weeks after the decision by Carrier — which had negotiated with Trump about the matter — to keep 1,100 Indiana jobs that were to move to Mexico.
These are real jobs with real benefits. But wait, the naysayers scream. President Obama created 180,000 jobs a month.
He did.
But 94 percent of those jobs weren’t full-time jobs with benefits. They were typically part-time, lower-paying jobs, mostly without benefits. People have to take two or three of those kinds of jobs just to make ends meet.
That’s not my opinion but the word from Alan Bennett Krueger and Lawrence Katz, whose meticulously researched paper, “The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States 1995-2015,” was published last March.
Now I don’t expect many to put off watching the big games this weekend to read this 34-page scholarly work, but the two Ivy League professors — Krueger chaired Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers — found that “94 percent of the net employment growth in the US economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements” — in essence, part-time or short-term contract work typically without bennies.
So only 6 percent, or 10,800 jobs a month, were bonafide full-time gigs.
Heck, Trump’s almost there and he’s not even president yet.
Real, sustainable jobs are what we need to strengthen the US economy. Just as important as creating the jobs is the message from Trump that no chance to create such opportunities for American workers will be too small for him to pick up the phone and apply some pressure or negotiate a deal.