Federally centralized job guarantees exclusively reduce income inequality – state authority fails.
Hafiz ’23 Hiba Hafiz is an associate professor with tenure. She joined BC Law as an assistant professor in 2018, and teaches and writes in labor and employment law, antitrust law, and administrative law. Her work focuses on strengthening workers’ bargaining power and legal solutions to labor market concentration and inequality. DRAFT, (forthcoming 2023/2024) “The Law of Geographic Labor Market Inequality” University of Pennsylvania law review, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4342785#:~:text=At%20its%20core%2C%20geographic%20inequality,in%20rural%20and%20distressed%20communities, 1/30/23 (WA)
Where monetary policy has indirectly regulated the value of worker earnings with geographically divergent effects, centralized fiscal policy had traditionally worked to fill gaps and generate national economic convergence. From the New Deal through the Johnson administration, direct federal job creation paired with centralized economic development planning and place-based industrial policy leveled out poorer and richer regions and reduced income inequality nationally.199 But beginning in the Nixon administration, and then more fully in the Reagan administration, New Federalism and neoliberal employment policies dismantled federal job guarantees and place-based anti-poverty and industrial policy programs in favor of a decentralized patchwork of block grants for anemically-funded training and welfare programs directed through states. Workforce development has since been governed by local officials and private employers with scarce oversight, minimal federal standards, and limited to no institutionalized worker representation. The resulting fiscal policy initiatives neither track nor attend to divergent increases in employer monopsony that disproportionately impact employment and earning outcomes in rural and distressed communities.