The aff is a welfare-to-work scheme. Arguments for a job guarantee’s radical potential are based on fundamental economic misunderstandings.

Like UBI, the job guarantee appears as a social and economic panacea in the writing of some of its advocates. However, JG writers most commonly claim a job guarantee can do three things: maintain full employment; strengthen workers’ overall bargaining power in the economy; help solve the climate crisis by creating green jobs.

As neoliberal capitalism moved away from policies to generate full employment after the inflationary crises of the late 1970s, some left economists looked for ways to solve the full employment-inflation trade-off. This is the origin of the idea of guaranteeing paid work through a government “employer of last resort” program. The notion, put forward by economist Hyman Minsky, was that the government could simultaneously maintain full employment and stabilize the economy through a job program that grew and shrank according to the business cycle.

But this is where the most glaring contradiction appears. Minsky and those who followed him insisted that the wages of JG jobs would be kept low enough to not produce wage-induced inflation in the private sector. If private sector workers demanded too much, employers could always hire low-wage workers from the JG program. However, somewhere along the line, contemporary JG advocates got the idea that a job guarantee could do the opposite: that it would improve the bargaining power of all workers by eliminating unemployment.

Insofar as contemporary JG advocates believe a job guarantee that sets a higher minimum wage can avoid this problem, they are both mischaracterizing a central feature of the JG — that it won’t allow private sector workers to bargain up wages — and committing the same error as UBI proponents: thinking a policy fix can be an end-run around class struggle.

As with UBI, the job guarantee is ultimately about addressing unemployment. But insofar as a JG program would simply pool the unemployed in a minimum wage make-work scheme, it would ‘employ’ these workers only in the most superficial sense. And if it functioned according to its original design, a job guarantee would contain, not enhance, the power of private sector workers to demand more.

Although JG writers claim the program would not be another form of workfare, it’s hard to imagine a job guarantee program under present political conditions not functioning as a welfare-to-work scheme. Neoliberal attacks on social supports have been characterized equally by cuts to income supports and workfare. A job guarantee program runs the risk of continuing this trend. Though left JG enthusiasts argue that the program shouldn’t be used to coerce social assistance recipients into paid work, in the hands of neoliberal politicians it could very well operate in this way. The JG is no less amenable to neoliberalism than a UBI.

What about the JG’s potential as a green jobs program? This is perhaps the most surprising claim of all. There’s no question that transitioning away from fossil fuels and averting the climate crisis will necessitate a massive expansion of public sector employment. But thinking this can be achieved through a minimum wage job guarantee program only confuses matters. Because the JG is fundamentally about guaranteeing employment, it must not include any skills requirements and must provide work to all those who apply.

The green jobs necessary for a just transition, however, will involve considerable skill and training. These need to be secure, adequately paid public sector jobs. A job guarantee, according to its principal policy architects, is also by definition a temporary employment program. JG jobs, as economics professor L. Randall Wray argues, would grow and contract according to the performance of the private sector labour market. A green transition needs good public sector employment, not temporary minimum wage workfare.

Some writers imagine JG workers also working in the caring economy. Canada desperately needs publicly funded eldercare and universal childcare, along with greater investment in health and education more broadly. Yet a job guarantee program could not be depended upon to staff these highly skilled caring jobs. Moreover, the claim that a JG program with no skills requirement could meet these needs reinforces the sexist and racist argument that such jobs aren’t skilled.