The CP Solves – A Federal Job Guarantee is a legal backstop to creating reparations and shifting the capitalist state

IN HIS 1944 STATE of the Union address – forwarded to the Hill at midday and then delivered by radio to the American public because he’d taken to bed with the flu — Franklin Delano Roosevelt pressed for an Economic Bill of Rights. “We cannot be content,” he said, “if some fraction of our people […] is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.” To Roosevelt, freedom from want and fear would cement the core civil and political rights then so cherished by a nation at war. As he put it, “Necessitous men are not free men.” First and most fundamental among his list of entitlements was “the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.” In a time when unprecedented collective labor — often designed and guided with a visible federal hand — was displacing a global threat, Roosevelt wanted to spirit into the future with the best of New Deal progressivism in tow. To guarantee a decent job, he reasoned, would not only ensure a peacetime focus on “new goals of human happiness,” it would also “spell security” — inaugurating a thriving domestic body and preventing a future slide from home to homefront. In invoking the Bill of Rights, Roosevelt was developing a lexicon of economic entitlement that bridged the Founders’ bitter correctives and a ripening postwar idiom of human rights. FDR’s language, or a less decorated version of it, appears in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23(1), which reads: “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.” Scores of political economists and development scholars — Amartya Sen, Sandy Darity, Amit Bhaduri, among others — have since depicted full employment as the economic fundament of participatory democracy, a policy that underwrites “the right to regular income for a decent living” alongside “the duty to contribute to social production.” Two decades after the New Deal, proposals for a federal job guarantee (FJG) were at the heart of the Poor People’s Campaign led by an increasingly radical Martin Luther King Jr. In 1965, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin’s “Freedom Budget” demanded, in the name of poverty eradication and racial equality, “full and fair employment for all.” Coretta Scott King — who in 1974 co-founded the National Committee for Full Employment/Full Employment Action Council (NCFE/FEAC) — christened the movement’s next phase, offering a more transformative vision of what the “job” in “job guarantee” might be. Scott King wanted to angle our conception of work toward “jobs that would serve some human need” — spotlighting health care, education, arts, and cultural workers in the spirit of FDR’s “new goals of human happiness” over jobs “created with the profit-making motive.” While the profit-making motive in FDR’s day co-occurred with — and in many senses gave rise to — war and economic depression, today the twin catastrophes of insecurity are unemployment and environmental decay. Even before the pandemic, joblessness affected millions of Americans, with underemployment touching millions more. By some Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, nearly 20 million Americans, at any given time, are unable to secure adequate work. The pain of joblessness is immense, whatever disciplinary tally we call up — from sterile neoclassical models lamenting dips in aggregate demand or bedraggled “human capital”; to rising “anti-social” behavior and crime; to spiking rates of depression, reports of uselessness and a narrowed sense of dignity, disrupted and sometimes ruptured family and friend dynamics, and amplification of gender asymmetries and racial tensions. (Citing telework and job loss, Japan, in the isolation wrought by COVID-19 as all of us make cubicles of our homes, has become the latest country to appoint a Minister of Loneliness.) Were instrumental reasoning enough, you would expect economists to have jettisoned unemployment from model and policy alike; instead, macroeconomists peddle a measure called the “natural rate of unemployment” that, so the toy model goes, beats back inflation. Happily, a recent chorus of heterodox thinkers have argued fears of inflation are consistently overblown — materializing only to consolingly pat the invisible hands of elites and muzzle the labor movement. Just as happily, some economists are beginning to challenge the premise that joblessness is a “natural” phenomenon at all. As Pavlina Tcherneva suggests, the same way we might squint at similar economic neologisms — imagine a “natural rate of homelessness” — so should any rights-centered approach denaturalize involuntary unemployment. If unemployment is unnatural, perhaps employment need not despoil the natural either. This notion, too, has roots in a deep lineage of scholars, artists, and activists envisioning an economy centered on “care work,” with care construed as stewardship that might secure — indeed, help heal — the personal, the public, and the environmental at once. Whether it’s teaching, tending public parks, or elder care, care work has the benefit that it’s often low-carbon. And from Scott King to today’s proposals from segments of the eco-socialist left to the abundance preached by Modern Monetary Theory, a key demand is working less (which would, say, reduce emissions from commuting) without reduction in pay. But beyond its greener ends, grounding economic life in care — and changing our orientation toward work, more than just tweaking the number of care jobs on offer — might also help lift our politics up from the neoliberal muck that’s gridlocked environmentalism for decades. It’s no coincidence that Coretta Scott King, and the Black working-class movement behind her, advocated for guaranteed jobs that were “meaningful,” that “[served] some human need.” The other side of the crisis in unemployment is invisible, unpaid caretaking labor often done by women of color. Climate activists and writers like Naomi Klein, particularly amid a pandemic, have pushed a similar concept of “repair work,” where repair is tangibly civic (“battalions of tree planters”) but also “intensely inward”: “[T]he practice of connecting, or re-pairing, those many crucial connections that our culture so systematically severs.” Repair, then, must also mean reparation: to repair inner narratives means dissolving false national myths — Klein imagines, drawing on demands from contemporary Black and Indigenous activists, a Truth and Reparations Commission — and toppling the false idol of the border wall, including proposals for an Indigenous Land Back program. But what of the “remunerative” part of FDR’s Bill of Rights, and what of his assumption that this work will take place in shops, farms, mines? The reparative possibilities of a job guarantee have another forebear in Silvia Federici’s 1975 essay, “Wages Against Housework,” an intellectual lodestar of the Wages For Housework campaign and a call-to-arms against the injustice of women forced into roles as unpaid care workers. “They say it is love,” the piece began, in a riotous slice of collective prosody: They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work. They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism. Every miscarriage is a work accident. […] More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile. Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational hazards of the housewife. Federici sought to “refuse that work as expression of our nature, and therefore to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us.” Naturally, her detractors claimed “Wages Against Housework” would inevitably fuse homo economicus with home ec., dragging the capitalist’s ledger into the home in a way that would further dig women into a cultural trench of cooking, cleaning, and consoling. But this misses Federici’s point. She wanted an entanglement of for and against, arguing recognition and compensation of care work were shifts that could augur both its refusal and renovation: throw sand in the capitalist gears whose teeth only ever turned to nominate a gendered and racialized class for the task of social reproduction — but do so in a way that acknowledged the creeping traumas that care might answer. It seems fitting that Federici’s essay should open with a kind of choral protest in unattributed verse, capacious and transpersonal enough to stress this dual noncompliance: as Leigh Claire La Berge, author of the Federici-inspired Wages Against Artwork, writes, “Wages are needed and wages are not enough.” True remuneration alone will go a long way — for the precariat, the federal guarantee is the legal backstop that allows for a foundation in care work to begin with.