A jobs guarantee is any and all jobs program.

Sawicky’s article, and the flowering of dozens of mutually incompatible proposals that all go under the name “job guarantee,” suggests to me that Matt Yglesias is probably right about how to ultimately treat this development. Rather than treating “job guarantee” as referring to a specific set of ideas coming from a specific set of scholars, what has happened (and what will continue to happen) is that “job guarantee” has become a catch-all slogan for any and all jobs programs. In this way, many thought leaders with radically different ideas can nonetheless be united in their goal for the creation of a “job guarantee.”

What this means, then, is that “job guarantee” is just the new “full employment.” The Left has been talking about full employment forever and making reference to that concept any time it is doing employment-promotion policy. “Full employment” never referred to a specific proposal, but rather an ambition or target to strive for. “Job guarantee” now fills the same role and also sounds a lot better than “full employment,” which means it is probably a positive development all things considered.

Of course, there is still a risk in all of this that something more akin to the canonical JG program gets implemented (rather than just ordinary public production now being called job guarantee, as Sawicky advocates) and thus a risk that we wind up with a new workfare. This is especially a concerning risk for as long as we keep talking about the job guarantee using the exact same rhetoric Democrats used to advocate for the 1996 welfare reform. But it seems the best strategy to mitigate that risk is probably the Sawicky one: adopt the new “full employment” slogan but work to fill it up with less objectionable content.