1. FJG is counterproductive – it kills motivation to work and efficiency

(Guy, British professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London,[2] and co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), PhD Econ@Cambridge, “Basic Income as Common Dividends: Piloting a Transformative Policy,” http://www.revistaprimerapiedra.cl/PDF/documentos/PEF_Piloting_Basic_Income_Guy_Standing2019.pdf//jum)

**bracketed for problematic language

Another failing of the job guarantee route is the mapping of a path to ‘workfare’. What would happen to somebody who declined to accept the guaranteed job? They would be labelled ‘lazy’ or ‘choosy’ and thus ‘ungrateful’ and ‘socially irresponsible’. Yet there are many reasons for refusing a job. Studies show that accepting a job below a person’s qualifications can lower their income and social status for the long term. As what is happening in the current UK benefit system attests, those not taking jobs allocated to them would face benefit sanctions, and be directed into jobs, whether they liked them or not. Jobs done in resentment or under duress are unlikely to be done well. A job guarantee would be a recipe for perpetuating low productivity. What would happen if a person in a guaranteed job performed poorly, perhaps because of limited ability or simply because they knew it was ‘guaranteed’? If you are guaranteed a job, why bother to work hard? If you are an employer and are given a subsidy to pay employees guaranteed a job, why bother to try to use labour efficiently? If subsidised through tax credits or a wage subsidy, a worker would need to produce only a little more value than the cost to the employer to make it profitable to retain [them] him or her. This would cheapen low-productivity jobs relative to others and inhibit the higher productivity arising from labour-displacing technological change. If a job of a certain type is guaranteed, what happens if an employer wishes to invest in technology that would remove the need for such jobs? Those calling for a job guarantee also ignore the fact that any market economy requires some unemployment, as people need time to search for jobs they are prepared to accept, and firms must sift applicants for jobs they want to have done. To adopt a job guarantee policy would risk putting the economy in gridlock. Job guarantee advocates, such as Larry Summers, President Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary, argue that people without jobs ‘are much more likely to be dissatisfied with their lives’ and are more likely to be drug addicts and abusive than those with even low-wage jobs.135 This is bogus. I suggest there would be no correlation between life satisfaction and having a job if the comparison was made between those in lousy jobs and those with no job but an adequate income on which to live. Somebody facing a choice between penury and a lousy job will prefer the job. But that does not mean they like or want it for itself. The polling company Gallup conducts regular State of the Global Workplace surveys in over 150 countries. In 2017, it found that globally only 15% of workers were engaged by their job, and in no country did the figure exceed 40%. One recent UK survey found that 37% of jobholders did not think their job made any significant contribution. Summers ends his article by equivocating – ‘the idea of a jobs guarantee should be taken seriously but not literally’. He seems to mean government should try to promote more employment, through ‘wage subsidies, targeted government spending, support for workers with dependants, and more training and job-matching programmes’. In other words, he reverts to the standard social democratic package that has not done very well in the past three decades. Besides being a recipe for labour inefficiency and labour market distortions, tending to displace workers employed in the ‘free’ labour market and to depress their wages, the job guarantee proposal fails to recognise that today’s crisis is structural and requires transformative policies. Tax credits, job guarantees and statutory minimum wages would barely touch the precariat’s existential insecurity that is at the heart of the social and economic crisis, let alone address the aspirations of the progressive and growing part of the precariat for an ecologically grounded Good Society.136