Every Author Agrees

What is a job guarantee? The job guarantee is a federal government program to provide a good job to every person who wants one. The job guarantee is a long-pursued goal of the American progressive tradition. In the 1940s, labor unions in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) demanded a job guarantee. Franklin D. Roosevelt supported the right to a job in his never-realized “Second Bill of Rights.” Later, the 1963 March on Washington demanded a jobs guarantee alongside civil rights, understanding that economic justice was a core component of the fight for racial justice. Coretta Scott King went on to lead a grassroots movement for a job guarantee after her husband’s death.

Tcherneva 18 (Pavlina, Pavlina R. Tcherneva is an associate professor of economics at Bard College and founding director of the Bard-OSUN Economic Democracy Initiative. She specializes in modern money and public policy. She previously taught at Franklin and Marshall College and the University of Missouri–Kansas City. During 2000–6, she served as the associate director for economic analysis at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability. In the summer of 2006, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy, UK, and since July 2007 she has been a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute. Her areas of research include monetary and fiscal policy coordination, the Bernanke doctrine, and policy responses during the 2008 and 2020 COVID-induced economic crises. “The Job Guarantee: Design, Jobs, and Implementation”, SSRN, April 3 2018, , Accessed July 27, 2023) // CD

The job guarantee (JG) is a public option for jobs. It is a permanent, federally funded, and locally administered program that supplies voluntary employment opportunities on demand for all who are ready and willing to work at a living wage. While it is first and foremost a jobs program, it has the potential to be transformative by advancing the public purpose and improving working conditions, people’s everyday lives, and the economy as a whole. This working paper provides a blueprint for operationalizing the proposal. It addresses frequently asked questions and common concerns. It begins by outlining some of the core propositions in the existing literature that have motivated the JG proposal. These propositions suggest specific design and implementation features. (Some questions are answered in greater detail in appendix III). The paper presents the core objectives and expected benefits of the program, and suggests an institutional structure, funding mechanism, and project design and administration.

Jobs For All 21 (Jobs For All, The Job Guarantee Now! campaign is led by PolicyLink, the National Jobs for All Network, and Public Money Action, in partnership with hundreds of advocates for racial, economic, and environmental justice, “Jobs for All: A Prosperity Economy”, Jobs For All, February 18, 2021, , Accessed July 27, 2023) // CD

By ensuring that every person who wants to work can have a living-wage job with full benefits, a Federal Job Guarantee would eliminate involuntary unemployment, reduce racial inequities, decrease poverty, and raise the floor for all low-wage workers while building stronger and greener communities.

Modern Money Network ND (Modern Money Network, The Modern Money Network (MMN) aims to bring accurate and accessible knowledge of our monetary and financial systems to the broader public. MMN also seeks to sharpen and refine knowledge of money and finance by fostering an interdisciplinary community devoted to learning and scholarship. “Job Guarantee”, The Modern Money Network, No Date, , Accessed July 27, 2023) // CD

A government job guarantee is a proposed program where the government would provide a job with a basic wage and benefits package to anyone willing and ready to work. The job guarantee is one component of an overall program to stabilize an economy. The job guarantee is financially feasible when a sovereign government’s currency uses a floating exchange rate. The job guarantee provides a floor for wages and benefits, creating a buffer stock of labor. The program is intended to “hire off the bottom,” i.e. those with less qualifications or skills. A job guarantee program hires people who otherwise cannot find employment. Once implemented, a job guarantee would be a permanent program, operating during good times and recessions alike.

Matthews 18 (Dylan, Dylan Matthews has since 2018 served as a senior correspondent and head writer for Future Perfect, Vox’s section that tells stories about people and institutions trying to do the most good for the world they can. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts in the US and abroad, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy. “Job guarantees, explained”, Vox, April 24 2018, , Accessed July 27 2023) // CD

Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand have all embraced a bold new idea they think will revitalize the American economy: a job guarantee. Under the proposal, the federal government would guarantee a well-paying job, with benefits and a high enough salary to pay for rent, transportation, and food, to every citizen who wants one. Anyone who didn’t have a job and wanted one could go into a local office for a government agency — call it the Works Progress Administration, maybe — and walk out with a regular government position paying a livable wage ($15 an hour, perhaps) and offering health, dental, and vision insurance, and retirement benefits, and child care for their kids. Different people would do different things: teaching or working for after-school programs or providing child care or building roads and mass transit or driving buses and so on. But everyone would be guaranteed a job, including during recessions. Involuntary unemployment would be a thing of the past. No one who works would be in poverty.

Encyclopedia.com ND (THE WORLD’S #1 ONLINE ENCYCLOPEDIA, “Job Guarantee”, Encyclopedia.com, No Date, , Accessed July 27 2023) // CD

A job-guarantee program is one in which government promises to make a job available to any qualifying individual who is ready and willing to work. Qualifications required of participants could specify age range (e.g., teens), gender, family status (e.g., heads of households), family income (e.g., below poverty line), educational attainment (e.g., high school dropouts), residency (e.g., rural), and so on. The most general program—sometimes called an employer of last resort (ELR) program—would provide a universal job guarantee by which government promises to provide a job to anyone legally entitled to work.

Darity & Hamilton 18 (William, Darrick, William A. "Sandy" Darity Jr. is an American economist and social sciences researcher. Darity's research spans economic history, development economics, economic psychology, and the history of economic thought, but most of his research is devoted to group-based inequality, especially with respect to race and ethnicity. Darity Jr. graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree from Brown University in 1974, where he earned honors in economics and political science. He was named a Marshall Scholar after undergraduate school, and on the scholarship spent one year studying at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 1978 he completed a doctorate in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Darrick Hamilton is an American academic and administrator who is currently the Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy and a University Professor at The New School for Social Research. He is also the director of the Institute for the Study of Race, Stratification and Political Economy at The New School. Prior to assuming these roles in January 2021. Hamilton earned his Ph.D. in economics from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1999, and his bachelor's degree (also in Economics) from Oberlin College. “The Federal Job Guarantee”, Intereconomics, 2018, , Accessed July 27, 2023) // CD

https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2018/number/3/article/the-federal-job-guarantee.html

To remedy this, we have been long-time advocates of the permanent establishment of a federal job guarantee to eliminate working poverty and involuntary unemployment. Our plan constitutes a genuine public option for employment that enables existing workers, particularly those confined to the low end of the labor market, to bargain and obtain higher wages, greater benefits and better working conditions. The job guarantee would offer a permanent, viable alternative to low pay, low benefits and poor working conditions for all Americans. It would produce a structural transformation of the American labor market and the American economy.

Landwehr 20 — Jannik Landwehr, a climate finance junior advisor for Greenwerk, holds a M.A. in Economic Policies from Université Paris 13, a M.A. in international Economics from the Berlin School of Economics and Law, and a B.A. in socio-economics from the University of Hamburg, (“The Job Guarantee,” Exploring Economics, 2020, available online at https://www.exploring-economics.org/en/discover/job-guarantee/, accessed 07-27-2023) // CD

The general idea of a Job Guarantee (JG) is that the government offers employment to everybody ready, willing and able to work for a living wage in the last instance as an Employer of Last Resort (Tcherneva, 2018). The concept tackles societal needs that are not satisfied by market forces and the systemic characteristic of unemployment in capitalist societies. Being a central part of the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), attention for the JG concept rose in recent years.

Gimms ND — The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies, an independent, non-profit organisation which is part of a growing international movement which challenges the economic orthodoxy of the last four decades, 2023 (“Job Guarantee,” GIMMS, available online at https://gimms.org.uk/job-guarantee/, accessed 07-27-2023) // CD

A Job Guarantee (JG) that works to keep inflation down as it provides employment to anyone willing and able to work is central to MMT. Employment rates are important in any economic analysis. For many decades economists and politicians have conducted economic policy on the basis that unemployment is an economic stabiliser (i.e. it stabilises the levels of wages and consumption). There is an assumption that allowing just enough unemployment in the economy prevents inflation from rising above a target figure. It is known as the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU). Under such policies both working people and the unemployed have paid a heavy price in terms of job insecurity and reduced standards of living, whilst governments have compensated for low wages (and subsidised the companies that pay them) through tax credits and other benefits.

Hail 17 (Steven, Economist and Lecturer, Modern Money Lab. Adjunct Associate Professor at Torrens University Australia. Author of Economics for Sustainable Prosperity (Palgrave Macmillan 2018), Flinders University PhD in Economics, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) BSc (econ) and MSc (econ) economics,” A conversation about job guarantees ”, Linkedin, July 29, 2017, , Accesed July 19, 2023) // CD

Explain the concept of a job guarantee program? • A job guarantee involves a commitment to provide optional government funded employment opportunities, alongside optional training and education opportunities, to everyone who wants to take advantage of them, at a socially acceptable level of wages and working conditions, which then set a floor that the private sector and conventional government sector must at least match.

King 20 (Adam, Adam King is currently a Post-Doctoral Visitor in the Department of Politics at York University in Toronto, Ontario. His PhD is in Sociology and he research in the fields of Labour Studies, Political Economy, and the Sociology of Work and Working-Class Culture. , UBI And Job Guarantees Aren’t The Leftist Solutions We Need, Maple, 5-28-2020, https://www.readthemaple.com/ubi-and-job-guarantees-arent-the-leftist-solutions-we-need/, Accessed 7-19-2023)//CD

A JG is sometimes included alongside, but usually counterposed, to UBI. As with basic income, job guarantee proposals vary. In the most popular JG plan, a federal job program would guarantee employment to anyone unable to secure other private or public sector work. JG jobs would pay the minimum wage and offer a minimum benefit package. Like UBI, a job guarantee generates support because of its straightforward pitch: everyone who wants a job should have one, regardless of whether it can be provided by the market.

Aronoff 18 (Kate Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at The New Republic and the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet And How We Fight Back. Kate is also the co-editor of We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style and the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal. Previously, she has held fellowships at the Type Media Center and the Climate Social Science Network. Her work has appeared in outlets including the New York Times, The Nation, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and Dissent, where she serves on the editorial board. She is a regular commentator on climate politics and has appeared on (among other programs) All In with Chris Hayes, Democracy Now!, On the Media, and the Brian Lehrer Show., Intercept, April 1 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/04/01/federal-job-guaranteed-jobs-program/, Accessed 7-19-2023)//CD

A federal job guarantee is exactly what it sounds like. “The private sector,” Hamilton tells me, “does not absorb stigmatized workers — those that are formerly incarcerated, black, disabled — at the same rate that it does nonstigmatized workers. A job guarantee would enable workers, particularly at the lower end of the labor market, but throughout the labor market too. It would remove the threat of unemployment and of being destitute.” By making living-wage work available to anyone who wants it, the program would also establish a de facto wage floor, forcing private sector employers to match the kinds of wages, working conditions, and benefits available to workers through the public sector. “It gets rid of involuntary unemployment altogether,” Hamilton said.

Kurtzleben 18 (Danielle, Kurtzleben was with U.S. News & World Report for nearly four years, where she covered the economy, campaign finance and demographic issues. As associate editor, she launched Data Mine, a data visualization blog on usnews.com, spent a year as a correspondent for Vox.com,  political correspondent assigned to NPR's Washington Desk. She appears on NPR shows, writes for the web, and is a regular on The NPR Politics Podcast, Likely 2020 Democratic Candidates Want To Guarantee A Job To Every American NPR, 5-8-2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/05/08/609091985/likely-2020-democratic-candidates-want-to-guarantee-a-job-to-every-american, 7-19-2023)//CD

A jobs guarantee program can take different forms, but the basic idea behind any program is the same, according to Darity. "Under the conditions of a federal job guarantee, everybody would be assured of getting to work if they were seeking work. So in effect, the unemployment rate would be zero," said Darity. "In an ideal world, if I lost my job in the morning, I could walk over to what we would now truly call an employment office and have new work by the afternoon." This separates it from a job subsidy program, he said, in which the government would help boost the number of jobs — perhaps massively so — but neither create all those jobs itself nor guarantee the jobs to those seeking one.