We need a Job Guarantee now more than ever. The following pages present the case for its overwhelming benefits and a blueprint for its implementation. Its design is inspired precisely by the way policy is supposed to respond to pandemics, by prioritizing preparedness and prevention. Decades of austerity have led to the erosion of essential public sector programs, services, and institutional capacities, leaving us woefully unprepared to respond to this pandemic and the social crisis that will follow. The public was baited into accepting austerity with the myth that the federal government could run out of funding. And yet, almost overnight, the US government passed an unprecedented $2.2 trillion package to tackle the pandemic, with additional spending on the way according to bipartisan consensus. Many countries around the world are doing the same. Finding the money was never the problem. Finding the political will to rally behind key policies always was.
Tomorrow, when politicians ask “but how will the government pay for this program?,” the answer should always be “the way we paid for the pandemic.” If we can pay for all the interventions necessary to stem this crisis, we surely can afford to guarantee jobs, homes, healthcare, and a green economy. What we cannot afford is to emerge out of this moment with the same economic problems and inequalities that created so much suffering and devastation even before the current pandemic.
Introduction
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
– Seneca
“There are no guarantees in life” is a familiar refrain, as is “if you really want something, you have to work for it.” But what if what you really want is paid work – a decent, well-paid job? And what if you cannot find it because, well, there are no guarantees in life?
This is the paradox the Job Guarantee proposal aims to solve. It is a public policy that provides an employment opportunity on standby to anyone looking for work, no matter their personal circumstances or the state of the economy. It converts the unemployment offices into employment offices to provide voluntary public service work opportunities in a wide range of care, environmental, rehabilitation, and small infrastructure projects. The Job Guarantee is a public option for jobs.
The guarantee part of the proposal is the promise, the assurance, that a basic job offer will always be available to those who seek it. The job part deals with another paradox, namely that while paid work in the modern world is life-defining and indispensable, it has, for many, become elusive, onerous, and punitive. The job component in the Job Guarantee aims to change all that by establishing a decent, living-wage job as a standard for all jobs in the economy, while paving the way for the transformation of public policy, the nature of the work experience, and the meaning of work itself.
The Job Guarantee deals with two very specific aspects of economic insecurity: unemployment (intermittent or long-term), and poorly paid employment (precarious and unequal). There are other labor market problems such as wage theft, discrimination, poverty, and stagnant income growth. And there are other forms of economic insecurity too, such as the lack of affordable and high quality food, care, housing, and education, or a lack of protection from the ravages of climate change. While, in a certain sense, the Job Guarantee has a narrow and clear mission – to provide a decent job at decent pay to all jobseekers who come a-knocking – by its very nature and design it addresses a wide range of social and economic problems and helps deliver a fairer economy.
At bottom, the Job Guarantee is a policy of care, one that fundamentally rejects the notion that people in economic distress, communities in disrepair, and an environment in peril are the unfortunate but unavoidable collateral damage of a market economy.
The idea of using public policy to guarantee the right to employment is not new. Its long life and resilience stem from its deep moral content. It was affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights, it was a signature issue in the struggle for civil rights, and it is etched into many nations’ constitutions (inspired by the Universal Declaration). But its mandate remains unmet. In the US, the architects of the 1946 Employment Act and the 1978 Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act tried, but ultimately failed, to implement appropriate legislation to secure it. In the absence of a universal right to work, intermittent direct employment programs around the world have attempted, however imperfectly, to fill the void, many with perceptible success.
Today, the Job Guarantee has been hailed as “the single most crucial aspect of the Green New Deal,”1 conveying that environmental justice cannot be delivered without economic and social justice. The Green New Deal and the Job Guarantee aim to resolve two seemingly distinct, but in fact organically inseparable, existential problems – those of climate change and economic insecurity. What good is a green future in which the dangers of global warming have abated, but families and whole communities continue to experience deaths of despair due to poverty, unemployment, and economic distress? And what kind of an economy would it be which made well-paid jobs available to all, but continued to exploit and devastate the natural environment on which we vitally depended?
Although the Job Guarantee predates the Green New Deal, it has always been green – from the days of Roosevelt’s Tree Army to modern proposals like the one outlined in this book – prioritizing environmental conservation and community renewal. The Green New Deal is an ambitious policy agenda designed to transform the economy and deliver a habitable planet to future generations. The Job Guarantee embeds economic and social justice into the scientific response to climate change; it is an indispensable part of the green agenda that would ensure that no one would be left behind in the transition. But it is also a transformative macroeconomic policy and safety net that would tackle decades-long labor market problems along with the dislocations that would emerge from the greening process. Put simply, the Job Guarantee ensures that, while we work to protect the environment and transform the economy, we have a policy that protects working people and transforms the work experience itself.
This book presents the Job Guarantee proposal and explains why it is critical to the climate movement. It also contends that, even after the Green New Deal has fulfilled its mission, a market economy would still require a Job Guarantee. This is because the program serves as an ongoing shock absorber and a powerful tool for economic stabilization, which is perhaps its most critical macroeconomic feature. It was absent in the era of industrialization, when paid work became the indispensable yet unreliable ticket to securing a livelihood. It was missing in the postwar era, when economic depressions were banished but unemployment was not expelled along with them. And it is lacking today, when neoliberal policies have weakened core worker rights, while policy makers stabilize prices on the backs of the unemployed. The Job Guarantee is a policy that was needed well before we irreversibly polluted the environment, and it is one that will still be necessary after we have cleaned it up.
The vision for the green Job Guarantee articulated here connects job creation to environmental conservation. It also defines green policies as those that address all forms of waste and devastation, including and especially those of our human resources. A green policy must remedy the neglect and squander that come with economic distress, unemployment, and precarious work in particular. As the late Nobel Prize winning economist William Vickrey argued, unemployment is “at best equivalent to vandalism,” bringing an unconscionable toll and ruin on individuals, families, and communities.2 Yet conventional wisdom considers unemployment to be “normal.” Economists even call it “natural” and devise policies around some “optimal” level of joblessness.
The idea that involuntary unemployment is an unfortunate but unavoidable occurrence, and that there is an appropriate level of unemployment necessary for the smooth functioning of the economy, is among the great, unexamined myths of our time. It is also bad economics.
