There are two categories of job guarantee proposals: ones like Tcherneva who think that universality is good, and others who think various eligibility criteria should be attached.

Marie Hasdenteufel, Modelling a Job Guarantee for Germany using a Job Search Model, November 2021,

There exist various approaches to define the group of eligible persons. At this point, the literature can clearly be divided into two fields: those, proposing a Job Guarantee to anyone willing to work (Tcherneva, 2020b); and those defining eligibility criteria such as age, duration of unemployment spell or other factors and proposing a Job Guarantee as a sociopolitical instrument to the unemployed (e.g. Picek, 2020; Lietzmann et al., 2018). In any case, the more restricted the criteria are, the bigger the threat of excluding potential candidates (Lietzmann et al., 2018), and consequently, the smaller the aggregate effect. Previous work argues that the number of people joining the public labor force would be higher than the number of officially registered unemployed: Sawyer (2003) puts emphasis on the “hidden unemployment” (Sawyer, 2003, p. 889)16 and concludes that the number of real unemployed workers is much higher.17 However, there are contrary opinions in the literature. Although there might be more unemployed persons than officially reported, the Job Guarantee is likely to have a stabilizing effect on the overall economy which would downsize the pool of workers in the public program (Tcherneva, 2018).