From the moment President Barack Obama was inaugurated until he signed the $787 billion stimulus bill on February 17, all the activity surrounding the package focused on him and Congress.

Now the spotlight shifts to governors, local officials, federal regulators and even HR professionals. These people will influence how the massive package is utilized.

I’ll get to the part about HR in a moment. But first, governors will determine whether and how the unemployment benefits tucked into the stimulus behemoth will become a reality. My colleague Ed Frauenheim outlined the changes in an online feature story.

Some governors, however, are wary of signing up for the $7 billion in incentives that the package provides to enhance coverage for low-wage workers and extend it to part-time workers.

They worry that long after the stimulus funding has evaporated, they will be responsible for a much larger unemployment system that could require higher taxes on businesses to maintain.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is one of the skeptical state executives. He has already raised unemployment payments by $25 each week, a provision of stimulus that is fully federally funded. But he says that the so-called modernization initiative could have a deleterious effect on Indiana.

In an interview with Indiana reporters while he was in Washington on February 23 for a meeting of the National Governors Association, Daniels said that his state’s unemployment program already is paying out more than it takes in. The “leakage” would be exacerbated if it was extended to part-time workers and incorporated other changes under the stimulus incentive.

“If you take this short-term bait, you commit yourself to this larger expenditure,” Daniels said. “That wouldn’t be a good bargain for us. Indiana’s already got some of the most generous benefits in the country.”

Unemployment reform is just one of several major changes contained in the stimulus bill that did not get through Congress on their own over the course of many years. Another is a $1.6 billion, two-year reauthorization of Trade Adjustment Assistance.

The TAA program provides training and health care benefits for workers who have lost their jobs due to global competition. Under the changes in the stimulus bill, it now covers employees in the service sector. Previously, help was limited to those in manufacturing.

TAA now applies to workers affected by offshoring to all countries—including China and India—not just those with whom the U.S. has trade agreements. Other provisions increase training funds available to states by $575 million per year for the next two years and also create TAA programs for entire communities.

These changes would be helpful to workers. But the regulations needed to implement them could take six months to a year, according Howard Rosen, executive director of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Coalition.

The Department of Labor has to determine how to identify a service industry—and service employees, for that matter. For instance, TAA could include computer programmers for the first time.

“This is very technical stuff,” Rosen said.

But a bigger challenge is introducing TAA to HR professionals, according to Rosen. Many companies don’t know the program exists, let alone understand that it has been expanded.

“There’s going to have to be an incredible outreach effort,” Rosen said.

That job is complicated by the fact that most HR people aren’t familiar with how unemployment insurance works.

“I’m astounded by their basic lack of knowledge of the unemployment system that has existed for 75 years,” Rosen said.

Now TAA can better augment standard severance payments. “This is aggressive employment services, which many companies don’t provide,” Rosen said.

As he was promoting the $787 billion economic stimulus bill, President Barack Obama hailed the behemoth measure for transcending traditional adversarial lines. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and organized labor all pushed Congress to approve it.

The aligning of interests proved that there was something for everyone in the sprawling legislation, which Obama says will generate or save 3.5 million jobs over two years.

Business and labor agreed on a substantive point as well. They both said Congress should devote as much attention to whether the U.S. labor force is prepared for new jobs as it does to creating them.

Two people on the business-labor continuum made that point at separate events last week as the package was being rushed through Congress.

Harold “Terry” McGraw III, chairman and CEO of publishing firm McGraw-Hill, appeared at a National Press Club news conference February 11 to outline the goals of the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives from big U.S. companies. McGraw is Business Roundtable chairman.

“Most of the recent discussion has centered on the size and shape of the stimulus projects,” McGraw said. “But even the best package risks failing if America doesn’t have skilled workers to fill the new jobs.”

The stimulus bill provides $3.95 billion for job training. But the total number could be larger than that because training funds are spread out in different areas. For instance, the bill expands help for workers who lost their jobs due to global competition. Under an enhanced Trade Adjustment Assistance Program, states would get $575 million more in training money each fiscal year for two years.

The Business Roundtable backs TAAP expansion. It is calling for “green job” training and a worker-training tax credit for employers. The group also is setting up what it calls the Springboard Project, which will draw together representatives from business, labor, education and government to develop recommendations for workforce preparation.

The next day, February 12, a House subcommittee held the first hearing in the process to revamp the Workforce Investment Act, the law that encompasses the nation’s worker training programs. The measure was due for an update in 2003, but reauthorization has been stalled since then.

Morton Bahr, president emeritus of the Communications Workers of America, testified at the hearing on behalf of the National Commission on Adult Literacy. That group released a report last year showing that up to 88 million Americans lack at least one educational credential that would give them upward mobility.

Bahr said the key to helping union members—and everyone in the labor market—to move on to better jobs is to change the way education is perceived. Americans have to embrace lifelong learning, not just K-12 or even kindergarten through college.

In an interview after the hearing, Bahr said training helped AT&T operators qualify for new jobs after their positions dwindled following the breakup of the phone monopoly in the mid-1980s. The union helped workers enter programs giving them skills needed to become technicians or move into other work.

AT&T and the CWA created the Alliance for Employee Growth and Development in New Jersey in 1986. The initiative provides training for AT&T workers. It’s revered by management and labor and is protected during bargaining disputes.

“It’s never held hostage,” Bahr said. It’s one example of the joint labor-management educational programs sponsored by 16 unions and 400 employers.

For the moment, labor and management are locked in a death match over a bill that would make it easier for workers to form unions. Wouldn’t it be nice to hear more about how the two sides can work together to advance employee skills—something both sides agree is crucial to economic growth?

The first week has become the worst part of each month. That’s when bad economic news gets worse—or at least when the bad news is first announced. On Friday, February 6, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a loss of 598,000 jobs in January, bringing the total to 3.6 million since December 2007.

The collapsing economy is creating more and more “have nots,” as in those who don’t have a job. If you’re not a “have not,” you’re probably worried about becoming one.

In this atmosphere, it’s no surprise that the biggest “haves”—Wall Street CEOs—are coming under heavy fire for their exorbitant pay packages. They raked in enormous bonuses while their companies lined up like individual Oliver Twists asking for hundreds of millions of federal bailout dollars.

They’ve made themselves inviting political targets. On February 4, President Barack Obama took aim by issuing an executive order that would limit executive pay to $500,000 annually at financial institutions that seek “exceptional assistance,” as opposed to TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) capital injections, from the government in the future. 

The only addition to that base pay would be restricted stock options that only vest when the government is paid back. In addition, golden parachutes would be limited for the top 25 executives.

As he has done frequently in his short time in office, Obama used the bully pulpit to make his point. He excoriated the Wall Street crowd, calling the disbursement of “customary lavish bonuses … the height of irresponsibility.” He was just warming up. “That’s shameful,” Obama said. “And that’s exactly the kind of disregard for the costs and consequences of their actions that brought about this crisis: a culture of narrow self-interest and short-term gain at the expense of everything else.”

Wall Street executives have become fodder for many Democratic causes. Rep. George Miller, D-California and chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, used CEO pay as a rhetorical device in promoting his favorite legislation, a measure that would make it easier for employees to form unions.

In a Capitol Hill rally on February 4, Miller said the bill would give workers leverage to raise their wages and increase their benefits, making it possible for them to gain their fair portion of gains from their productivity that are now going to “corporate elites” like CEOs and shareholders.

But there is hope yet for the embattled Wall Street CEOs. Just as the executive pay rules included in TARP last fall did not put a crimp in the compensation spigot, the new ones may not shut off the cash flow either.

For one thing, the executive order only applies to companies that ask for “exceptional assistance” in the future. Those that sought it last fall—including American International Group, Bank of America and Citigroup—are not affected.

In addition, the rules apply only to people at the top of the financial firms, leaving the door open for many other multimillion-dollar bonuses farther down the corporate ladder. Critics quickly pointed out the shortcomings of the plan.

Some assert that Wall Street leaders have the insight, financial acumen and leadership ability to deserve every penny of the tens of millions—or even hundreds of millions—of dollars they receive. Of course, the disastrous shape most of their companies are in creates at least an embarrassing if not devastating counterpoint to this argument.

Quite apart from their talent, though, the executives have something else just as important going for them—their collective political war chest. The pilgrimage to Wall Street for political donations each election cycle is a bipartisan phenomenon.

Obama did quite well trolling the Street. He raised $14 million of his $750 million from the “securities and investment” industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Companies that received federal bailout money last fall made $37 million in federal campaign donations.

Contributing money to a candidate is not inherently corrupt. In fact, it’s a form of free speech that should be defended—as long as the sources of campaign cash are transparent.

But it does pay to follow the money in politics. Politicians might nip at the hand that feeds them. But they probably won’t chomp down with executive pay laws that have real teeth.