Outside Voices: Small Business

Want Job Creation? Look to Microbusinesses, not just Detroit

November 25, 2008 RSS Feed Print

Comment (6)
Tweet

Dawn Rivers Baker

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, microbusiness employers created a slight share of total new jobs and cut about the same share of total jobs lost as firms with more than 1,000 employees during the first quarter of this year. In other words, these two firm size classes had approximately the same impact on the labor market for the quarter.

Stop and think about that for a minute.

Job creation is one of the holy grails of the economy. That's a big piece of the reason why your government is spending tens of billions of dollars in bailouts of private-sector companies these days. They believe that creating and retaining jobs is one of the most important side effects of economic growth.

You will note that the firms begging for bailouts are uniformly members of that very large business club, firms with more than 1,000 employees.

Lawmakers don't want those big firms to go under and put all those voters . . . I mean, employees, out of work. After all, those large employers can have quite an impact on the labor market.

As we have seen, growing microbusinesses can have essentially the same impact on the labor market. Even better, they can do so without costing anything close to $25 billion.

Unfortunately, it seems that nobody has noticed.

Dawn Rivers Baker is the award-winning journalist behind The MicroEnterprise Journal, the online business news weekly that covers politics and policy, the economy, and research for and about microbusinesses. Baker also blogs at The Journal Blog.

Tags:: small business

« Previous Post Next Post »

Reader Comments Read all comments (6)

Add Your Thoughts Comment Name State Email

Please enter the two words below into the text field underneath the image.

Your comment will be posted immediately, unless it is spam or contains profanity. For more information, please see our Comments FAQ.

Some really interesting details you have written on money.usnews.com .Aided me a lot, just what I was searching for :D .

seo services of AL 5:44PM January 21, 2012

I would add to your comments that it is my observation that the most efficient users of capital are small/microbusiness. You put $17.4 billion in the hands of small entreprenuers and they will create jobs, innovation and new industries will be created. They have not learned how to waste capital trying to save last centuries industries and they can put that capital to work NOW.
The pipeline of projects are already there ready to go. The SBA and the SBIC lenders already have thousands of applications in the queue that are going to waste. Many of them have requests for additional capital from existing loans that they could approve, probably saving more than a few home mortgages. Raise their lending limits, cap their rates, increase the amount of leverage they are allowed, fast track the application approvals and REQUIRE they put the whole amount to work by March 31st.
I have never seen an application for capital that did not include money for hiring people. This could be done very quickly with immediate impact.
Let's find a political voice for this, please.

Tom Marsh of CA 12:20PM December 21, 2008

I couldn't agree more: and beyond microbusiness as going concerns, is the necessary development of new businesses from the knowledge resources of the recently unemployed/underemployed. This entrepreneurial effort must be supported and nurtured by several sectors: the workers themselves; the government; and corporations, who will benefit from the use of generated knowledge capital.
-Ian Miller
http://accordadvisorygroup.blogspot.com

Ian Miller of NY 6:56PM December 01, 2008