A federal jobs guarantee centers the focus away from the root causes of inequality and towards increased production

‘Good’ and ‘bad’ jobs have long gripped social, political and academic attention, and the widespread and protracted ‘degradation of work’ has only intensified post-2008 recession and through the global pandemic (Braverman, 1974; Kalleberg, 2021). ‘Bad’ work appears endemic to late capitalism – materialising as ‘underemployment, unemployment, wagelessness, wage repression, in-work poverty, crises of livelihood, precariousness, and emptied-out futures’ (Adkins, 2018: 1). Substantial research connects good work to good health; bad work or no work, in contrast, with poverty, illness and early death (Wadsworth et al., 2010: 9). Indeed, late capitalism seems to be defined by a widening disconnect between the optimism of economic indicators and the grim reality of many people’s everyday working lives and livelihoods. Despite this unsettled status, good jobs often figure in public discourse as a tonic for past damage, as well as a charm for a good future. Hope that good jobs will guarantee a good future has profound consequences for public investments of all kinds, captivating immense political and economic resources (see, for example, the International Labour Organization’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, or the European Commission’s 2019 commitment to ‘create more and better jobs’; Adamson and Roper, 2019: 551). This persists even as critics point out that work might not solve social problems, but instead exacerbate and propel issues of widespread impoverishment and inequality (Adkins and Dever, 2014). Despite these contradictions, the political, social and emotional power of the ‘good job’ persists as an idea, a figure in the social imaginary, in ways that remain poorly understood. In this article, we track emotion in everyday news discourse about jobs at a time of political and economic crisis and reckoning, in order to theorise an ‘emotional social imaginary’ under late capitalism (what we call the morbid romance of the good job), to help us understand how and why we keep deeply investing in economic systems that injure our wellbeing, equity and environment. In Wales, the site of our case study, deindustrialisation, rising levels of insecure, dead-end and low-paid work, along with unprecedented austerity-driven cuts, mean almost a quarter of all people and 40 percent of children, live in poverty (Barnard, 2018). Our material comes from a content analysis research project exploring narratives of poverty in which problems with work (job losses, low wages, immobility, precarity, zero-hours contracts and in-work poverty)1 dominate every other poverty-related topic (Moore et al., 2018; Moore, 2020). These jobs stories, moreover, ring with feeling, figures of speech and of myth, and evocative metaphors, such that jobs emerge as a sore collective concern, and command public investment2 in ways that seem both counterintuitive and poorly understood. To theorise these observations, we develop research on the social imaginary, or how common-sense ideas come into view and come to grip us through discourse, as well as how public feelings like hope might attach us to (and entrap us in) particular economic circuits and futures (Berlant, 2011).