Structural barriers block full employment that a guarantee wouldn’t fix

Even in a world with perfect Fed policy, there’ll still be some unemployment. “Full employment” doesn’t mean literally mean “every single person is employed.” There will still be caregivers, retirees, and severely disabled people who aren’t in the workforce, and due to regular job churn and seasonal work, some working people will be unemployed in any given week. Ski instructors might not work in July, scuba instructors might not work in December, and so forth. When I left the Washington Post, I was “unemployed” for two weeks before I started at Vox because I wanted to visit friends and family for a bit. It was fine.

But there’s some structural unemployment that’s decidedly not fine because it’s not desired by the people who aren’t employed. Plenty of disabled people, for instance, would like to work but face structural barriers, like a lack of work accommodations or an inability to pay for health aides on the job, or a lack of work in a sector where they’re physically able to do the labor. (For instance, if you use a wheelchair and the only work available is as a server at a restaurant or a sales associate at a pharmacy, you might be out of luck.)

Recently incarcerated people face barriers both due to the stigma associated with incarceration and because they’ve been out of the workforce for a while. Some mothers who would like to work lack adequate child care to do so.

Job guarantee advocates argue that the program would help people in these kinds of situations find work and reintegrate themselves into the workforce. And they might — but helping people with significant work barriers is difficult, and might not be best accomplished by a universal program, most of whose enrollees won’t have severe work barriers.

A job guarantee plan released by Mark Paul, William Darity Jr., and Darrick Hamilton for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities states that enrollees will all have access to a high-quality health insurance plan. But will they also have access to health aides and other support services, in case of disability? Most health insurers that aren’t Medicaid don’t cover those kinds of supports. Will the job guarantee offer free child care for mothers who want to work?

Many job guarantee plans suggest child care and elder care as professions that enrollees could take up. But those jobs require significant training to do effectively, and in any case, a job guarantee is not necessarily the same thing as a child and disability care guarantee.