Interpretation: Affirmatives must specify receivers of employment, living wage, safeguards against inflation, and funding. Failure to do so waters down solvency—neg on presumption

How can we achieve full-employment legislation that is not watered down, that starts out with and holds onto a genuine, enforceable job guarantee? Make no mistake about it. Such legislation would be transformative, removing an essential source of disciplining the labor force, freeing workers of the threat of unemployment, and providing them with labor rights that are all too scarce in today’s “precarious” workplace. Of course, we need stronger and more sustained efforts to mobilize public support and create a powerful social movement, but that will depend partly on legislation worth fighting for—legislation that guarantees a job to anyone who needs and applies for one; has safeguards against inflation; specifies a living wage; and has an adequate funding source that is likely to be acceptable to a wide swath of the public, such as the financial transfer tax proposed in the Jobs for All Act (H.R. 1000) that will be reintroduced in the 116th Congress by Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.). Whereas earlier proposals failed to specify “remunerative” employment, current proposals call for wage levels; compatible with those of living-wage advocates such as “Fight for Fifteen”—important potential participants in a jobs-guarantee campaign.

Experts consulting with legislators who favor a job guarantee agree about the general goal of a permanent job guarantee and about the essential component of direct government job-creation but disagree on some other elements of design. It is important for experts to reach consensus so supporters won’t be divided. The experts are beginning to confer, explain their decisions, explore their differences, and hopefully achieve some common ground.

The two previous attempts to achieve full employment were led by committed and powerful legislators, but presidential leadership was either lacking or insufficiently strong. High-profile legislators will be needed again, but powerful presidential advocacy is essential. A third try for this “fundamental” economic right is most likely to succeed if meeting the requisites for a living-wage job guarantee is a major campaign promise of a winning presidential candidate whose party gains control of both houses of Congress—and who, in his or her halcyon days, makes passage of a job guarantee a top policy priority. The campaign for the presidency would be a powerful means of mobilizing public support—along with advocates’ continuing efforts to convince a wide range of interest groups that their goals would be aided by enactment of this “fundamental” economic right. A major vehicle for that is an online Jobs for All Newsletter that the National Jobs for All Network will begin publishing early in 2019. Perhaps an endorsement of a jobs guarantee by powerful politicians will enable advocates to raise sufficient funds—heretofore elusive—for more vigorous and successful movement-building.

Public support for a solution to a social problem depends partly on whether the problem is considered widespread. Because the official unemployment rate is a serious undercount that minimizes the problem, the National Jobs for All Network has long called attention to “The Full Count” that is always more than twice the official number. Each month when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases unemployment data for the previous month, Jobs for All not only posts the official rate on its website (njfac.org) but what it refers to as “hidden unemployment”—the number of people who are forced to work part-time or who want a job but are not actively looking, perhaps because they are discouraged or lack transportation or day care. Advocates of full employment should also propose and promote research resembling the “Subemployment Survey” undertaken by the Department of Labor in the 1960s—a survey that would undoubtedly demonstrate how widespread the problem is in low-income areas.

When the official unemployment rate is low, like the current 3.7%, some may object that a job guarantee is not necessary. How should advocates respond to this? First, we should point out that, even in times like this, the labor market is millions short of providing jobs for everyone who wants work and that including “hidden unemployment” more than doubles the number of unemployed, bringing the current total to 15.8 million people. Moreover, the Department of Labor bases these statistics on the “civilian labor force,” thereby leaving out the the military and the oversize population of prisoners, many of whom would be unemployed.

We need to think of a job guarantee the same way that we regard unemployment insurance—protection that is always needed but for which the level of need varies. During downturns like the Great Recession, need skyrockets. Today, the need is reduced but still present, and for people who need work the consequences of not having it are just as devastating as they are for greater numbers of people during recessions.

Despite the similarity in fluctuating but omnipresent need, there is an important difference between unemployment insurance, for which most job seekers do not qualify, and a job guarantee. A job guarantee is just that: available to all job seekers for whom jobs do not exist in the regular labor market. And unlike unemployment insurance, it would allow them to earn their own livelihood instead of keeping them on half rations until they find a job (which in a job-short economy will always mean that someone else will go jobless).

Current job-guarantee proposals create jobs through an updated model of the New Deal work programs that vastly expanded our national resources during the Great Depression. Updated how? They guarantee employment, whereas the New Deal work programs, though unprecedented in size, did not serve all of the unemployed and often short-changed women and black people. The direct government job-creation approach has the added benefit of being anti-inflationary, because it can target job-creation to unemployed workers in contrast to an overall stimulus like a tax cut, which can heat up an economy in areas where there is little surplus labor. The updated New Deal model is a potential political asset. In a recent campaign to promote a municipal Jobs for All program, the National Jobs for All Coalition distributed a Map and Guide to New Deal Public Works in New York City showing that many of the iconic sites associated with New York were created by workers employed in New Deal work programs. (See Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, “The Living New Deal,” D&S, September/October 2017.) A job guarantee achieved through direct government job-creation would not only provide employment and training to unemployed workers and reduce the debilitating social problems caused by joblessness that are so costly to both the unemployed and to society. Jobs-for-all legislation would employ workers in upgrading the nation’s depleted physical, human service, cultural, and environmental resources. This is a persuasive rallying cry: that conquering unemployment by government job-creation would not only benefit jobless people, their families, and communities—it would benefit all of us.