A JG is not neutral – it pushes a producerist ‘workfare’ mindset which devalues labor primarily undertaken by women and crowds out other welfare objectives.

In recent years, a job guarantee (JG) has (re)emerged as a policy proposal among Left and Left-of-Centre politicians, and as a movement demand among labour and social activists across North America, particularly in the United States.1 In its most popular iteration, the JG is positioned by American proponents as a form of guaranteed employment that is administered through a federal jobs program, available to all those unable to secure private or other public sector employment, and paid at the level of a minimum “living” wage.2 At this most basic level—which draws on a lengthy intellectual and policy tradition concerned with guaranteed employment—the JG is understood as a means through which to achieve full employment by having government act as an “employer of last resort.” 3 Additionally, the JG is now commonly proposed alongside a range of other progressive policies associated with the recent growth of the democratic socialist and progressive Left in the United States. In this sense, the JG fits together with other pillars of the current democratic socialist agenda (Medicare-for-all, Green New Deal, and tuition-free public college), all of which aim to build and expand the Left’s political constituency through the appeal of universal social programs.4 When attached to other social policy objectives, the JG has been advanced as part of the framework to address climate change through a Green New Deal,5 as a mechanism to tackle racial injustice and inequality,6 as a way to improve labour standards throughout the economy,7 and as a means to maintain or boost economic demand while narrowing wage and income inequality.8 Some proponents of the JG advance a fairly narrow set of economic claims, while others tie the idea to a broader suite of policies and objectives associated with the emergent progressive Left. Academics and activists are found in both camps, yet contemporary JG advocates spend much less time discussing the historical origins of the JG, and, when they do, the discussions frequently lack a critical evaluation of how its implementation could impact other labour and social welfare policies. As a seemingly universal political demand aimed at tackling involuntary unemployment and low-wage work (and perhaps used to address the climate crisis through a “just transition”), the idea has thus found considerable contemporary purchase. However, its association with a particular variant of PostKeynesian thinking concerned with unemployment, inflation, and social welfare benefits remains less explored. In this article, I critically engage with writing about the JG from two angles. First, by exploring the history of the JG proposal in the work of Post-Keynesian economist Hyman Minsky, I show how the JG emerged in part as a response to the inflationary crisis of the 1970s and the breakdown of postwar welfare capitalism. Looking at the intellectual and political origins of the JG allows a critical evaluation of claims made by contemporary proponents, most notably L. Randall Wray and his associates at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.9 In short, Wray et al.’s claim that the JG’s capacity to raise wages and improve working conditions throughout the labour market by drying up labour surpluses is, at best, overstated, and, at worst, highly unlikely given how Minsky and others previously framed the JG’s role as an economic stabilizer, that is, as a way to maintain full employment without the inflationary consequences associated with the Phillip’s Curve employment-inflation trade-off. For Minsky and others, the JG, although it is a progressive alternative to the mix of monetarist policy, neoliberal austerity, and “human capital” supply-side approaches to the labour market then becoming hegemonic, was nevertheless also about taming inflation, facilitating wage restraint, and reducing welfare dependency. Second, using insights from feminist political economy,10 I also explore the ways that JG proponents often rely on a narrow and gendered conceptualization of (waged) work that both obscures uncompensated social reproductive labour (still performed largely by women), and displays a disdain (sometimes explicit and other times somewhat veiled) for “cash benefit” forms of social welfare. I contend that, at its core, the JG is characterized by a political suspicion of the welfare state and a producerist orientation to questions of work, income, and labour force participation. Given the deep connection between neoliberalism and the restructuring of social welfare policy towards various forms of “workfare,” 11 this article argues for a cautious and critical approach to the job guarantee that both takes account of its intellectual origins and registers the risks it poses in further eroding other components of the North American welfare state.