GE's Immelt Burns Bridges One Remark at a Time

He may be a captain of industry, but General Electric chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt isn't getting any salutes from other C-Suite comrades this week. They're feeling miffed that Immelt has been taking them to task, beating down US CEOs for not doing more to spur job creation.

In speaking out against corporate America, Immelt further infuriated conservative commentators who can’t abide his cozy relationship with President Obama.

Maybe Immelt didn’t get a Dale Carnegie course in winning friends and influencing people as part of his Harvard MBA, Class of ’82. In any event, earlier this week, the chair of Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness called out his fellow capitalist titans for being stingy about creating jobs at a time of rising unemployment in the US.

“The people who are part of the business sector, the people in this room, have got to stop complaining about government and get some action underway,” Immelt told a jobs summit at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Monday. “There’s no excuse today for lack of leadership. The truth is we all need to be part of the solution.”

Besides the fact that many of his fellow CEOs, feeling accountable to their shareholders, don’t think investing in new U.S. jobs is a good idea given how the federal government is leading the economy these days, many also have the feeling that Immelt is hypocritical as well. That’s partly because GE has eliminated thousands of jobs lately, though some of it has been through divesting operations.

And it’s also because Immelt’s company lately has demonstrated an ability to avoid taxes that is “nothing short of extraordinary,” as ABC News put it a few months ago. So Immelt’s critics ask: Hasn’t President Obama said that righting the federal budget deficit and, by implication, the economy will require “shared sacrifice”? And wouldn’t that presumably include GE?

Rush Limbaugh was among the right-wing pundits who gave Immelt no quarter after he scolded other CEOs. Remember that Immelt was at the table and on the news clips, laughing, a few weeks ago after Obama made his tin-eared quip about how the “shovel-ready” jobs that were supposed to be provided by his 2009 stimulus plan “weren’t quite shovel-ready.”

“Obama and Immelt, you know what they’re like?” Limbaugh thundered on his radio show on Tuesday. “They’re like a couple of radical Islamic Imams telling these business owners to go out and sacrifice themselves to the cause. They’re bringing them into the room and they’re saying, ‘Here’s the cause, you guys go out, blow yourselves up, destroy your businesses and you with it, go out and hire people.’”

Today, Immelt acknowledged that there's no "magic potion" when it comes to spurring job growth.

According to AP's account of Immelt's visit to a GE-owned "gas turbine plant in Greenville, S.C., which employs 3,300 people including 1,700 engineers" —

Immelt said his four months on the Obama advisory panel has taught him that even his company can be held accountable for where it creates jobs. He says the panel is working on devising a hundred different business plans for every sector of the economy, with practical steps to help create jobs.

"It's very unlikely the jobs council's going to find something that will be a magic potion to create jobs," he said. But he noted there are things that can be done. For example, he said, America suffers from a shortage of engineers.