The Jobs Czar: General Electric's Jeffrey Immelt

General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt was charged by the president with a Herculean task: figuring out how to get big American firms to start hiring again. First, he says, we need "a sense of national urgency around jobs" and a government that's focused 100 percent on the task at hand. But can Immelt, a self-proclaimed globalist when it comes to running his own company, really help solve America's biggest domestic problem? Lesley Stahl reports.

The following script is from "The Jobs Czar" which aired on Oct. 9, 2011.

Not since the Great Depression has unemployment been this bad for this long. And one of the reasons is that U.S. companies have gone abroad for their workers and their profits. Over the last decade, big American firms have cut around 3 million jobs in the U.S. while adding almost as many overseas.

No company has gone global more aggressively than General Electric, the conglomerate that makes everything from refrigerators to MRI machines to jet engines.

GE's Jeff Immelt: The controversy over U.S. jobs
If you think the only initials on CEO Jeff Immelt's mind are "GE," then think again. He's also big on "R&D," research and development

This past week, President Obama has been out around the country talking about creating jobs. To help him get Americans back to work, he's recruited a most unlikely jobs czar: the Republican CEO of General Electric, Jeff Immelt.

Immelt: The mood is dark. People are pissed. Why not try to do better?

Jeff Immelt talked about his czarship at a recent gathering of GE managers.

Immelt: You know, I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and my parents are really right wingers. My dad watches like, five or six hours of "Fox News" every day and stuff like that. So I called home and said, "Hey, just to give you a heads up, you know, I'm going to be with the President and he's asked me to lead this jobs council." And my mother said, "Well, you said, no, of course didn't you?" I said, "No mom, that's not what I said."

[Immelt walking onto stage with President Obama, saying: Thank you]

Stahl: When you were chosen, there was a lot of criticism. I saw a headline that said, "The Job Czar from Hell" because of how many jobs GE has outside the US.

Immelt: I've taken heat from the right and heat from the left. And it's been uncomfortable sometimes for me personally to be, to work with the president on this. And I'm proud to do it.

What he's doing is heading a council of CEOs, Wall Streeters and labor leaders to help the president come up with ideas for immediate and long term job growth.

Stahl: We need to create 300,000 new jobs a month, just to get back to where we were before the recession.

Immelt: I think, Lesley, there needs to be a sense of national urgency around jobs that basically, if you just looked at how many hours a day do Republicans spend on job creation, do Democrats spend on job creation, and does the White House, it's nowhere close to 100 percent. We're not spending enough time on jobs.

One of the reasons the president chose Immelt as his jobs czar is because he's actually building new manufacturing plants in the U.S.

He wanted to show us one: this new factory in Batesville, Mississippi, where they're making jet engines for the new Boeing Dreamliner.

Stahl: Does anybody know how many different parts go into that?

Immelt: Somebody does. I'm not sure, if it's, it's not me!

Stahl: Not you!

Immelt: In this engine we probably have invested a billion and a half dollars as a company before getting the first, the first sale.

All told he is adding 15,000 jobs in the U.S. - about half in manufacturing.

Immelt: We've got whole new generations of jet engines, whole new generations of gas turbines. We're spending a lot inside the US.

In Louisville, Kentucky - where GE's Appliance Park has lost about 16,000 workers -- he's actually bringing jobs back from China and Mexico, where wages are going up.

Andrew Metz is the producer.

Immelt: You know, with the currency weaker, with wage-rates inflation lower here than the rest of the world, we think the U.S. can be quite competitive.

Stahl: What struck me is that the new plants don't hire a lot of people. You talk about hundreds instead of thousands. And I wonder, as you bring in new factories: they are so automated.

Immelt: You're going to have fewer people that do any task. In the end, it makes the system more productive and more competitive. But when you walk thru Mississippi, for every person that was in that plant, there's probably seven or eight in the supply chain.

Stahl: A lot of the jobs we saw were $13-an hour jobs. That's really not the ticket, is it, to a really vibrant middle class.

Immelt: We have a range. When we go out and recruit, let's say hire 1,000 people at between $15 and $17 an hour, we get 50,000 applicants. So I think you've gotta start somewhere and ...but we want to hire more people.

But here's the problem when it comes to creating jobs: the inflow's a trickle; the main event is still overseas. In places like Brazil, once known for sun, samba and soccer, now one of the world's fastest growing economies. Brazil is buying more GE products than almost any other country. It's no wonder they have a GE company town 90 minutes from Rio.

Stahl: You hear GE and you think Schenectady, New York. Lynn, Massachusetts. Petropolis, Brazil?

Immelt: It's the world we live in today, Lesley. This is where we have to be today to be successful.

And they are wildly successful in Brazil.

Where GE is growing at a rate of 35 percent a year compared to one percent in the U.S. Immelt showed us around a GE locomotive plant.

Immelt: If you go back five, 10, 15 years, maybe we made 30 or 40 locomotives here, you know, Lesley, we're now making 150.

Stahl: That's the horn?

Immelt: So just push? I need one of these in my office.

GE has become so global that more than half of its 300,000 workers are now overseas. We spoke to him on the floor of GE's jet engine servicing plant in Petropolis.

Stahl: How much of your revenues, now, come from overseas?

Immelt: Sixty percent.

Stahl: Sixty percent of GE's revenue is foreign.

Immelt: When I became CEO it was 30. Now, I wish all our customers were in Chicago. I mean everything about the U.S. is easier than doing business here, but this is where the growth is.

Stahl: You know, it's like a bucket of ice on your head. I don't think we have caught up to the reality of how much the world is consuming and-- and how we're slippin' back.

Immelt: You know, I-- I don't think it has to be all bad news. I still think there's lots of things we can do in the U.S., but the customers are here. And, and that's just the way it is.

GE has 8,000 employees in Brazil, and rising. At factory rallies here Immelt-as-cheerleader - looks out at the future of the company.

Immelt: I want you to get up everyday and want to beat Caterpillar. I want you to hate the color yellow and do everything you can to make sure we're winning and beating the competition.

On top of expanding the locomotive operation here, Immelt is building a new aviation plant and a new research and development center in Rio.

Stahl: You have also made the case that by increasing investment in a place like Brazil it would allow you to bring more jobs back home. Now, that's counterintuitive.

Immelt: Look around this room. All of these components come from the U.S.

[Immelt walking in factory, saying: How are ya doin?]

But after following him around Brazil, I wondered whether GE was still an American company.

Immelt: I'm a complete globalist. I think like a global CEO. But I'm an American. I run an American company. But in order for GE to be successful in the coming years, I've gotta sell my products in every corner of the world.

Stahl: I mean, you may personally think of yourself as an American. But your customers are over there. You put your plants over there, you even put research-

Immelt: If I wasn't out chasing orders in every corner of the world, we'd have tens of thousand fewer employees in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, Texas. I'm never going to apologize for that, ever, ever.

[Obama and Immelt at a GE factory.

Obama: I love coming to these plants.

Immelt: It's great.

Obama: Cause we actually see stuff getting made

Immelt: 90 percent exported from here.

Obama: That's exactly right!]

Immelt worked with the president to devise his $447 billion dollar jobs package. And now this week he and his Jobs Council - that's been holding meetings all around the country - will give Mr. Obama more proposals such as: reducing government regulations and spending more to retrain workers.

Stahl: If the Republicans say the government shouldn't spend, how the heck are we going to get ourselves out of this?

Immelt: No, no, this notion that the government has no role has never been true in the history of the United States. You know, really, all of the commercial aviation industry has grown out of defense spending. All of the health care innovation has grown out of the NIH.

In his 10 years as CEO, Immelt has remade GE, selling off half the company he inherited, including plastics, insurance and NBC.

[Sound-up from "30 Rock" episode.

Tina Fey: Oh my God.

Alec Baldwin: They're selling NBC to a company called Kabletown... With a K.]

At the same time, he has refocused the company on manufacturing, bulking up units like transportation, energy and research and development. As jobs czar he's urging his fellow CEOs to double their hiring of engineers and devote more money to R & D. At GE, he's tripled spending on everything from medical research to green technology, including the building of a solar panel factory in the U.S., even as other American solar companies are folding.

Stahl: Is this something that's incredibly risky for you?

Immelt: In G.E., this is extremely low risk because we have good technology and we have scale. The crime for U.S. is when we don't do things like that. We ought to be percolating twenty $1-billion businesses all the time that can grow inside our system.

But even while he promotes American innovation, he's been accused of transferring technology to other countries as in his recent joint venture with China where a new GE computer system will go into a Chinese airliner that could eventually compete with Boeing.

Immelt: It's a way we can grow and it's approved by the U.S. government, it's in an important market around the world and it creates 400 jobs in the U.S.

Stahl: Let me be more specific, are we in any way giving the Chinese a technology that they didn't have before, that--that depletes our-- competitive edge in the future?

Immelt: --we give nothing. We-- own it. No look, you're afraid of China, I'm not. We see them as a big market, and a big opportunity.

One thing Immelt is promoting that the president did not include in his jobs package is lowering the corporate tax rate from the current 35 percent -even though companies like GE rarely pay that much.

Stahl: One of the things that GE and you get hammered for is how little taxes GE pays. It's not quite zero, but it's pretty low.

Immelt: You know, we've had an extraordinary couple of years. We wrote off $32 billion dollars during the financial crisis. I think we should have basically the same tax policy that Germany, Japan, the UK, everybody else has, which is a tax rate in the mid-20s and no loopholes. Zero. The US has the most antiquated tax system. And that means some people are going to pay more taxes, and some people are going to pay less.

Stahl: But I guess the big question for most people: would that create jobs?

Immelt: Look, that's a fair debate. You know, personally I think it's going to create jobs.

Stahl: But our companies are not spending. They're not investing in a way that would create jobs. And big corporations are sitting on billions and billions of dollars. They're just sitting on it.

Immelt: Companies should invest in the United States. It's still the world's biggest economy. And if companies just are going to sit on cash, they're going to lose. They're gonna lose because only the people that are going to invest their way through this crisis are going to win.

Immelt is also supporting a tax holiday for global companies to get them to bring back home more than a trillion dollars in profits they're keeping overseas. He says businesses would start hiring, even though they didn't when a tax holiday was tried in 2004.

Immelt: When it happened last time, it didn't.

Stahl: Right.

Immelt: So there's plenty of evidence that says that I'm not right about that. In other words, do I know how many jobs it's going to create? I don't. But it can't intellectually be any good to anybody to have $1.2 trillion outside the U.S.

Stahl: Shouldn't American corporations - don't they have some kind of civic responsibility to create jobs? No?

Immelt: My name is not above the door. I work for investors. Investors want to see us grow earnings and cash flow. They want to see us be competitive. They want to see us prosper.

He wishes the public felt the same.

Immelt: I want you to root for me. You know, everybody in Germany roots for Siemens. Everybody in Japan roots for Toshiba. Everybody in China roots for China South Rail. I want you to say, "Win, G.E."

Stahl: Do you not see any reason that maybe the public doesn't hold American corporations up here in the highest...

Immelt: I think this notion that it's the population of the U.S. against the big companies is just wrong. It's just wrong-minded and when I walk through a factory with you or anybody, you know, our employees basically like us.

Stahl: They do. I saw it.

Immelt: They root for us, they want us to win. I don't know why you don't.