President Obama has repeatedly called on companies to “step up” and increase hiring. Specifically, he has 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.”

With one month of dismal job reports after another coming from the government, it can be expected that there will be no change in this reality between now and the election. But what the president should be asking is why, three full years after his “Recovery Summer,” are we experiencing the worst economic recovery since World War II and now stand on the threshold of another recession?

Something the president seems not to understand is that there is one big reason there are 25 million Americans either unemployed or underemployed, and five workers for every one new job opening: government. Specifically, it’s the economic distortions that government at all levels imposes on the marketplace that keeps employers from wanting to engage in additional hiring.

“Risk,” or as he has stated it, “uncertainty,” is one of the biggest factors that companies deal with in the marketplace and his administration specifically and government in general have been creating more of it than we have seen in some time, which is saying something.  

A perfect example is in the construction industry, an industry still in a recession especially here in California where more than 25 percent of that workforce is unemployed. 

I represent construction companies, many of which are among the largest and most successful in America. They are leaders in the construction industry because they produce excellence and a good value to their clients, be they public or private. They are also leaders because they hire, fire, promote and respect employees and managers based on their merit, not some ambiguous union seniority system.

But in this corporatist White House, where the government picks the winners and losers, merit and excellence count for little, while who the biggest donors are to your team count for everything.

In the president’s case, those donors are unions, including building trade unions, and they have donated a great deal to the president and Democrats, and expect much in return.

Special-interest giveaways

Upon entering office, one of the president’s first acts was to sign an executive order encouraging the federal government to place project labor agreements on all federal construction work. PLAs are nothing but special-interest giveaways that give preference to unionized companies for public construction projects, even though 85 percent of construction workers choose to be union free.

How so? Incredibly, they require any company that bids and gets the job to have their workers pay union dues, pay into union benefit packages their workers will never benefit from, send their workers through union hiring halls in the hope they actually get sent to the job, and explicitly ban nonunion apprentices from working on the job at all.

Numerous studies show us what common sense makes clear will happen anytime a PLA is put on a project: fewer bidders and increased costs to taxpayers. In a time of trillion-dollar deficits and with America facing $16 trillion in debt, one would assume that giving our taxpayers the best work at the best price would be the least we could expect from those in high office. One would assume too much.

In California, we have seen more than 400 PLAs attempted over the past 20 years. Los Angeles is ground zero in the spread of this exclusionary disease. Readers of this newspaper won’t be surprised to learn that among those that use PLAs are the Los Angeles Community College District and the Los Angeles Unified School District. Utterly corrupt and incompetent entities like these are magnets for PLAs and the waste, fraud and abuse they invite.

Two years ago, our industry decided to take the decision-making process out of the hands of such elected officials and give it to the people. As a result, we have now banned PLAs in 11 different municipalities in California including the city of San Diego, where 58 percent of voters in June said no to PLAs. When was the last time you saw voters pass something with 58 percent of the vote while unions spent millions trying to convince them not to?

So here’s a deal for the president the next time he feels compelled to “encourage” companies to start hiring: Employers, like those I represent, will “step up” and allow the invisible hand of the market to create more jobs when the all-too-visible boot of the government has been removed from their throats.

My companies look forward to this becoming more of a reality Nov. 6.

Eric Christen is executive director of the Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction, based in Poway.