Job guarantee means creating a legally enforceable right for capable individuals, NOT merely giving someone a job.

It is worth noting that the job guarantee is not the same thing as requiring an un- employed person, who appears at the welfare office hoping for assistance, to go somewhere to perform some assigned menial work before he/she can obtain the needed assistance. There is a difference between a dignified solution to a problem and a degrading temporary quick fix. We should beware of what the politicians call "work-based welfare reform."

John Dewey once wrote: "The first great demand of a better social order, I should say, then, is the guarantee of the right, to every individual who is capable of it, to work-not the mere legal right, but a right which is enforceable so that the in- dividual will always have an opportunity to engage in some form of useful activity, and if the ordinary economic machinery breaks down through a crisis of some sort, then it is the duty of the state to come to the rescue and see that individuals have something to do that is worthwhile-not breaking stone in a stoneyard, or something else to get a soup ticket with, but some kind of productive work which a self-re- specting person may engage in with interest and with more than mere pecuniary profit" [Dewey 1939, 420-421].