Jobs Guarantees have historically been a crucial tool in black freedom movements since unemployment disproportionately affects black Americans – the plan allows for legislation to be shaped by grassroots force which is key to change while also creating a radical economy that endorses equity

In 1974 Scott King co-founded the National Committee for Full Employment/Full Employment Action Council (NCFE/FEAC) to fight for legislation that guaranteed jobs for all Americans. Guaranteed jobs for all who wanted them—regardless of race or gender—had long been a goal of Scott King’s and the black freedom movement. But in a time of rising inflation and unemployment, and fearing a growing backlash against the civil rights agenda, Scott King believed that guaranteed jobs were also necessary to mollify fears of economic competition on the part of white workers. In the 1940s her father’s sawmill was burned to the ground two weeks after its opening, following his refusal to sell to it to a white man. She knew that shared feelings of precarity could provoke racist violence just as much as they might elicit solidarity. Scott King’s struggle for guaranteed jobs to anyone who wanted one was as tactical as it was moral.

In current debates, demands for guaranteed jobs and demands for a basic income are often framed as diametrically opposed. But for Scott King and the broader black freedom movement, these were coupled together. Scott King was an ardent advocate for the National Welfare Rights Organization’s calls for a guaranteed annual income (which, in contrast to some basic income schemes, always emphasized the need for a cash benefit of a living wage). But she spent more time campaigning for guaranteed jobs. In these proposals, there were income guarantees that would be provided for those who are unable to work due to age, ability, or care-giving responsibilities. The goal was to expand the welfare state through social movement victories, not impose workfare.

It is also important to note that “full employment” for Scott King did not mean what it more commonly means today: a certain percentage of unemployment that economists and policymakers deem necessary in order to keep inflation at bay. As this conceptualization of “full employment” was taking hold, NCFE/FEAC denounced this style of public policy. The organization described it as an “unconscionable view that the evils imposed by unemployment upon scores of millions of people whose breadwinners are unemployed are acceptable in the name of restraining inflation.” Scott King and NCFE/FEAC insisted that full employment meant that the government needed to provide a good job to all who wanted one.

Likewise, NCFE/FEAC pursued a path away from the types of military Keynesianism that had become entrenched after the failure of the Progressive Party in the 1940s. As Scott King explained in 1975, “This nation has never honestly dealt with the question of a peacetime economy.” For her, economic well-being could no longer rely on building weapons for the military–industrial complex. Just as her husband had emphasized the importance of safe and dignified work through his support for Memphis’s sanitation workers, Scott King showed her support for human services by marching alongside the black women hospital workers of Charleston, South Carolina, during their 113-day strike in 1969.

Scott King’s vision of full employment emphasized jobs for social needs. “We are going to have to create meaningful jobs. . . . Jobs that would serve some human need. . . . As long as there are people you are going to have certain health care needs, educational needs, things that you know will make for a better quality of living.” She believed that it was essential to move beyond jobs “that were really created with the profit-making motive.” Accordingly NCFE/FEAC called for jobs programs to create housing for all; to encourage environmental conservation; to build mass transportation; and to provide more funding for the arts, cultural, and recreational programming. The organization sought to reduce the amount of time people worked, without a reduction in pay.

To do this, Scott King and NCFE/FEAC focused on shaping legislation. They were the grassroots force behind the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978. To support the bill, NCFE/FEAC’s organized a “Full Employment Action Week” in 1977. They mobilized more than 1.5 million people in protests and actions in three hundred cities. Sixty thousand people turned out to the rally in Buffalo, New York. Another forty thousand people attended the full employment parade in Erie, Pennsylvania. NCFE/FEAC worked alongside groups such as the National Council of Churches to create local organizations in Boston, Denver, Columbus, Des Moines, St. Louis, and other cities. The leadership of the Council of Churches echoed Scott King’s assessments during the week of action, saying that the federal government should serve as the “employer of last resort” to create jobs in “energy, mass transportation, housing, education, [and] health care.”

But these efforts were not enough. On the treacherous road from bill to law, the most innovative aspects of that law were stripped away. Provisions such as the creation of a legally enforceable right to a job—with a national planning mechanism to achieve this—were victims of intense opposition from the Business Roundtable and National Association of Manufacturers. Consequently, as Americans for Democratic Action reported to its members at the time, the Senate Banking Committee “did a real hatchet job on the bill.” Although forced to compromise with some of the provisions in the Banking Committee’s version of the bill, the new law still demanded that unemployment be reduced to 3 percent by 1983 and that the Federal Reserve now give biannual testimony to Congress on how the Fed was working to achieve these goals (since the Fed had been effectively ignoring its mandate to facilitate maximum employment since the 1950s). For Scott King, this partial victory was not the end, but one point in a longer journey.

Scott King’s struggles to create guaranteed jobs programs continue to hold resonance for today. What is the meaning of civil rights victories in the face of persistent unemployment? “The conscious politically motivated economic policies of the past few years that are keeping large numbers of Americans unemployed, especially blacks, are nothing less than a frontal assault on the gains and victories of the civil rights movement,” she said during the Full Employment Action Week. “What good is the legal right to sit in a restaurant if one cannot afford the price of food? What good is the promise of fair employment when there is no employment for black Americans?” These questions endure in this era of economic inequality: the Movement for Black Lives has similarly demanded guaranteed jobs. The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, whose leaders in the 1970s had worked alongside NCFE/FEAC, continues its longstanding efforts in this area. Each group carries on the legacy of black working-class political formations developing radical and expansive solutions to the problems of its era.