A job guarantee is not the only path to full employment. Reorganizing production around unpaid social labor solves better.

The conceptualization of welfare as a problem—indeed, as a “mess”—among JG writers is embedded in a producerist view of the economy and the place of paid employment within it.48 Minsky, Wray, Kelton, and other JG writers frame “productive” labour as central to human dignity and use this framing to build a normative foundation for their arguments in favour of full employment and welfare reform. However, the ways in which they position waged labour as central to both human flourishing and sound economic policy also obscure the vital contributions of unpaid social reproductive labour to capitalist economies, as well as the ways in which capitalist market exchange fails to register the value of unwaged work.49 As Nancy Fraser argues, the realm of production remains structurally dependent on “the hidden abode” of largely feminized and unpaid reproductive labour.50 Indeed, as many feminist political economists demonstrate, a central point of political contestation is precisely how the lines of demarcation are drawn between production for exchange, waged labour, and market commodification on the one hand, and social reproduction, unpaid labour, and decommodification, on the other. Melinda Cooper, for example, has shown how neoliberal policymakers have often utilized neoconservative “family values” discourse as part of their push for free market reforms. According to Cooper, the neoliberal marketization of ever-greater areas of social life crucially depends on shifting caring responsibilities into the space of the family—the site of unpaid reproductive labour.51 As governments of various political stripes impose austerity on public services, more of the work of social reproduction is offloaded onto “the family.” Minsky’s case for a “welfare policy” focused centrally on increasing labour force participation has unfortunately contributed to this general thrust towards valorizing paid employment at the expense of a critical feminist approach to the relationship between paid and unpaid work, and the decommodification of social supports necessary to more equitably redistribute the labour of care.

The myopic focus on paid employment is not confined to Minsky’s work, however. Contemporary JG advocates—while less explicit in their opposition to welfare—also privilege paid work in ways that complement capitalism’s structural dependence on, and lack of recognition of, social reproductive labour. Wray, for example, tends to lean more heavily on the political feasibility argument, claiming that the ease with which neoliberal politicians have cut or “reformed” welfare programs shows the latter’s weakness as a policy solution to poverty.52 Wray maintains that this is particularly evident in the way that the War on Poverty transformed into a “war on welfare” from Reagan onwards. This history of welfare retrenchment evinces the need to reorient social policy towards job creation and greater labour force participation. Such an approach is further substantiated, according to Wray, by Clinton’s “reform” to “end welfare as we know it” with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, 1996, and replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, both of which are widely recognized to encapsulate the “welfare-to-work” push of the 1990s’ workfare state.53 Wray contends that the lack of public support for AFDC, and thus its susceptibility to political attack, substantiates the need for a social policy geared towards public sector employment and a job guarantee (the political feasibility argument). Yet rather than develop a critique of what they believe to be the prevailing public consensus on “welfare,” Wray and Kelton use this public antipathy to buttress their argument for publicly guaranteed full employment. In this way, they reinforce a discourse that privileges waged “productive” labour and fails to recognize the structural dependence of capitalist market exchange on social reproductive work, which is often unpaid.

For Wray and others, social policy should bolster the centrality of waged labour and account for the ostensibly inelastic public disapproval of welfare. Yet JG advocates often neglect the ways that their advocacy of job creation and greater labour force participation might contribute to a politics of welfare retrenchment that does not lead to the kind of job program they envision, but instead to various forms of workfare pushing people into low-wage private sector employment. Indeed, it was no coincidence that paired alongside the Clinton administration’s reforms to AFDC was the Earned Income Tax Credit, which aimed to incentivize labour market entrance at the same time that welfare access was being limited and the general move towards “workfare” was intensifying.54 Clinton and his economic team drew approvingly on Minsky’s ideas about “welfare dependency” and the supposed poverty reduction potential of greater employment.55 Admittedly, Wray and other JG enthusiasts disapprove of the Clintonian approach. Building on Minsky’s criticisms of Johnson’s War on Poverty, they maintain that, likewise, the Clinton reforms were largely about forcing potential workers to be “employment ready” rather than creating public jobs, that is, they were labour market “supply side” reforms and not “demand” solutions. Yet by failing to account for how policy proposals might be taken up in an inhospitable political environment, JG advocates missed the ways that employment promotion fed the assault on social welfare.

According to JG proponents, the robustness of their proposal rests on its universality and its potential for political buy-in as well as its supposed economic soundness. Throughout his writing, Minsky remains committed to a federal jobs program without means-testing of any kind. In his critique of human capital theory and other related approaches to unemployment and poverty reduction, Minsky characterizes the focuses on education and skills development as forms of means-testing. Minsky believes that, by eschewing means-testing, his proposed JG program could achieve its objective of poverty reduction through full employment while preventing the program from being transformed into workfare. The problem is that although Minsky, Wray, and others recognize that the JG cannot and should not absorb all people outside the paid labour force, their strong focus on “activation” through government job creation potentially sets the conditions for the program to serve as a welfare-to-work scheme nonetheless. That the JG lacks means-testing is no guard against it functioning as a form of workfare in and of itself. In fact, its lack of eligibility criteria combined with stringent means-testing for welfare could be the very dynamic that facilitates the JG’s transmutation into workfare. In addition, if the only politically feasible JG ends up being one in which the base wage is persistently maintained at a low level, the workfare risk would be that much higher. Although we have not seen a jobs program of the variety Minsky advocates (and Wray et al. at the Levy Institute now propose), we have witnessed the discourse of “welfare dependency” and labour market activation being taken up by neoliberal politicians in the service of cutting social programs and buffering the labour market with a supply of low-wage workers.56 This should alert us to the ways in which such a focus on greater employment and reducing “welfare dependence” can be deployed in the push for neoliberal market reforms. The legacy of how Minsky’s ideas (if only partially and somewhat disingenuously) were taken up by the Clinton New Democrats should motivate critical reflection about some of the intellectual origins of the job guarantee and the potential for its “real existing” implementation to end in another variant of workfare.

Conclusion

The idea of guaranteed employment through a public sector jobs program has gained considerable popularity among social movement and labour union activists in the United States over the past several years. Although the notion of guaranteed employment through a federal jobs program has been part of certain strands of the North American Left throughout the twentieth century,57 important policy specificities characterize the most recent and popular iteration of the JG. Current demands for a JG draw upon the proposals of economists and policy researchers associated with the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and a particular variant of Post-Keynesian economics.

In this article, I critically evaluate this version of the JG proposal from two angles. First, by looking at the intellectual origins of the JG in the work of economist Hyman Minsky, as well as in the writings of contemporary JG proponents, I contextualize the JG’s origins as part of the search for a progressive full employment solution to the inflationary crises of the 1970s. Through this approach, I highlight what I take to be a central issue with contemporary JG proposals: the seeming incompatibility between the characterization of the JG as a price stabilization program—that is, as an inflation-containing approach to full employment—and current JG advocates’ claims about the programs’ potential to raise wages and labour standards for workers throughout the labour market. My contention is that it cannot do both simultaneously, and that it is likely that any politically feasible variation would simply pool the unemployed into a low-wage, workfare-like program.

Second, I offer a critique of the normative privileging of “productive” waged labour present in much writing about the JG. I argue that a strain of antiwelfarism runs through the work of JG theorists. JG writers’ central focus on labour activation leads them to characterize cash benefit forms of welfare as both normatively suspect and economically unsound, in the process obscuring capitalism’s dependence on the unpaid social reproductive work that is still being disproportionately performed by women. Theirs is an approach to social policy focused on expanding paid work and not increasing the social wage. This has led, in part, to JG advocates’ ideas about the centrality of employment being taken up (or coexisting awkwardly) alongside neoliberal efforts to cut welfare spending and entrench forms of workfare. An antiwelfare position continues to colour discussions of the job guarantee—sometimes without advocates acknowledging it explicitly.

Given the job guarantee’s current popularity—as well as the tendency for it to be advanced as part of the solution to many other pressing social issues—further critical reflection and debate are needed. The aim of this article has not been to suggest that the issues motivating consideration of a JG—from involuntary unemployment and poverty to the twin crises of climate change and growing income inequality—do not demand concerted policy solutions. Rather, the aim has been to critically evaluate the JG’s policy specifics. Furthermore, I do not mean to suggest that reorienting fiscal policy to the goal of full employment is not desirable. However, there is no need to equate full employment with a JG program or with an approach aimed at increasing labour force participation in ways that potentially risk cuts to social welfare spending; there are multiple roads to full employment. A robust welfare state with greatly expanded and permanent public sector employment could reduce involuntary unemployment without many of the issues with the JG outlined in this article. Ultimately, further research needs to address how labour policy and regulation could fit together with social welfare spending, the decommodification of social services, and the equitable distribution of resources, labour, and care in the policy mix of political programs and social movement demands going forward.