Job guarantee means the government unconditionally guarantees someone a job---it’s agnostic as to the mechanism.
L. Randall Wray 20, professor of Economics at Bard College and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, “Job Guarantee,” The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2020, pp. 1–9 Springer Link, doi:10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5_3080-1
‘Job Guarantee’ (JG) has become the favoured term applied to a variety of approaches that seek to ensure what can be described as true full employment. While often used as a synonym for ‘Employer of Last Resort’ (ELR), these terms evoke quite different framing. Employer of Last Resort implies that there is an entity that stands by to provide jobs to those who otherwise have failed to secure them. The term Job Guarantee implies a right to a job, although it does not indicate how that right will be secured. However, if we are to include the right to a job as similar to other recognized rights (right to life, right to free speech, right to vote, right to marriage), this would seem to imply that it is government that is to provide the guarantee. Many proponents of the JG do emphasize the human rights angle, interpreting the UN Charter on Human Rights as explicitly guaranteeing the right to access to a job (See Harvey 1989, 1993, 1999; Burgess and Mitchell 1998).
Unfortunately, each term carries a negative connotation: ‘last resort’ can be seen as derogatory—the potential workers cannot find anything better; ‘guarantee’ implies that potential workers must be employed no matter what. Together, these associations fuel suspicion that work done is of low quality and otherwise without merit. There have been some efforts to rebrand the proposal as Public Service Employment (PSE) to emphasize the positive potential of such jobs (Wray 1999).