{"id":6172,"date":"2017-09-16T10:25:13","date_gmt":"2017-09-16T17:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=6172"},"modified":"2017-09-17T12:44:24","modified_gmt":"2017-09-17T19:44:24","slug":"america-look-like-guaranteed-everyone-job-dylan-matthews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2017\/09\/16\/america-look-like-guaranteed-everyone-job-dylan-matthews\/","title":{"rendered":"“WHAT AMERICA WOULD LOOK LIKE IF IT GUARANTEED EVERYONE A JOB” by Dylan Matthews"},"content":{"rendered":"

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September 11, 2017 (Occupy.com)<\/p>\n

Imagine if a well-paying job, with benefits and a high enough salary to pay for rent, transportation, and food, were a human right.<\/p>\n

Imagine the U.S. federal government established a policy whereby anyone who didn\u2019t have a job and wanted one could go into a local office for a government agency \u2014 call it the\u00a0Works Progress Administration<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 and walk out with a regular government position paying a livable wage ($15 an hour, perhaps) and offering health, dental, and vision insurance, and retirement benefits, and child care for their kids.<\/p>\n

Different people would do different things: teaching or working for after-school programs or providing child care or building roads and mass transit or driving buses and so on. But everyone would be\u00a0guaranteed<\/em>\u00a0a job, including during recessions. Involuntary unemployment would be a thing of the past. No one who works would be in poverty.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a truly radical policy idea. But it has deep roots in the Democratic Party\u2019s past, from the New Deal\u2019s emergency employment programs to the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, a 1970s proposal that, as originally written, would have given unemployed Americans the right to sue the government.<\/p>\n

Today, there are even some actual proposals on the table. In May, the Center for American Progress\u00a0issued a report<\/a>\u00a0calling for a “large-scale, permanent program of public employment and infrastructure investment.”<\/p>\n

But some labor economists, even left-leaning ones, are skeptical. None of the programs, they argue, have done enough work on the details. And those details are crucial to the eventual fate of such a policy.<\/p>\n

An effective job guarantee that eliminated unemployment and boosted wages without negative side effects could be a very good thing. But an ineffective job guarantee that amounts to a welfare check plus onerous work requirements wouldn\u2019t just be bad policy \u2014 it would also be politically toxic.<\/p>\n

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WHY LIBERALS ARE FLOCKING TO JOB GUARANTEE PLANS IN 2017<\/h3>\n

It might seem strange to be debating how best to solve mass joblessness at a time when the U.S. unemployment rate is 4.3 percent, the lowest in over a decade.<\/p>\n

And indeed, analysts critical of the plan raise exactly that objection: \u201cAdvocates who imagine we need a major restructuring of the entire economy are utopian and dystopian all at once,” says Adam Ozimek, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. “They are utopian in that they imagine we can nationalize a quarter of the labor force without significant negative effects on productivity and economic growth. They are dystopian in that they imagine things are so terrible that this kind of radical transformation is necessary.”<\/p>\n

But there are both political and policy reasons for why the job guarantee is suddenly a hot topic.<\/p>\n

In the wake of the 2016 election, liberal commentators have latched onto the job guarantee \u2014 an idea pushed by some left-wing economists for years \u2014 as a way to forge a cross-racial working-class coalition. They need a plan that appeals to both to the white Wisconsin and Michigan voters who switched from Obama to Trump and to black and Latino workers left behind by deindustrialization. The ideal plan would both improve conditions for lower-income Americans while supporting Americans\u2019 strong intuition that people should work to earn their crust.<\/p>\n

\u201cA federal job guarantee is both universal\u2014it benefits all Americans\u2014and specifically ameliorative to entrenched racial inequality,\u201d Slate\u2019s Jamelle Bouie\u00a0notes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe job guarantee asserts that, if individuals bear a moral duty to work, then society and employers bear a reciprocal moral duty to provide good, dignified work for all,\u201d Jeff Spross\u00a0adds<\/a>\u00a0in the influential center-left journal Democracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf Democrats want to win elections, they should imbue Trump\u2019s empty rhetoric with a real promise: a good job for every American who wants one,\u201d Bryce Covert\u00a0writes<\/a>\u00a0in the New Republic. \u201cIt\u2019s time to make a federal jobs guarantee the central tenet of the party\u2019s platform.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s also a policy rationale for the idea\u2019s resurgence. Many experts think the unemployment rate makes the economy, or at least the labor market, look better than it really is. The unemployment rate only counts people looking for work, and the most recent recession and slow subsequent recovery forced some people out of the labor force. In January 2007,\u00a080.3 percent of people<\/a>\u00a0ages 25 to 54 were employed; in July 2017, only 78.7 percent were.<\/p>\n

If the rate had stayed at its prerecession peak, there\u2019d be 2 million more people employed today. If the rate were at its all-time peak (81.9 percent, in April 2000), there\u2019d be 4 million more people employed.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible those people will get jobs as the economy continues improving, but it\u2019s not a sure thing. For one thing, the Federal Reserve keeps raising interest rates, a move that effectively kills jobs. There are also other factors at play. For decades, in both good economic times and bad, the share of men who are either working or looking for work has been declining. The labor force participation rate for 25- to 54-year old men fell from 98 percent in the 1950s to 88 percent today, per\u00a0a 2016 report<\/a>\u00a0by White House Council of Economic Advisors members.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not just a matter of jobs. Wage growth has been somewhat anemic. During the last great boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s, wage and salary growth in the private sector, before adjusting for inflation, was about 3.5 to 4 percent per year, sometimes even topping 4,\u00a0according to<\/a>\u00a0the Employment Cost Index. In recent quarters, however, wage growth has hovered around 2.5 percent. That’s slightly worse than things were in the mid-2000s, before the housing bubble burst.<\/p>\n

Nor has the recovery been evenly shared. As of July 2017,\u00a060.4 percent<\/a>\u00a0of white people in America were employed, but only 57.7 percent of black people were. Once black men\u2019s disproportionate representation in prisons and jails is accounted for, the gap grows still larger. A mere\u00a027.7 percent<\/a>\u00a0of disabled people age 16 to 64 are employed, compared to 72.8 percent of nondisabled people.<\/p>\n

The bottom line is there are millions of people in the U.S. economy who could be working, but aren\u2019t. A jobs guarantee diagnoses that as a problem of demand: Private employers aren\u2019t doing enough to make use of the U.S. labor force. And it seeks to create such demand directly, by creating a new employer to provide it.<\/p>\n

Have a disability, and unable to find an employer who will provide the support necessary for you to work? Well, under a jobs guarantee, the government would function as just such an employer. Lack a high school or college degree? A jobs guarantee could offer you a stipend to gain more training; if you don\u2019t want to retrain, it could provide a skill-appropriate position that pays a living wage.<\/p>\n

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INDIA\u2019S SUCCESSFUL JOB GUARANTEE<\/h3>\n

Job guarantee advocates argue it wouldn\u2019t just affect people who take jobs through the job guarantee program. It would affect everyone else too. Walmart pays its employees\u00a0a minimum of<\/a>\u00a0$10 per hour; part-time employees aren\u2019t guaranteed benefits\u00a0like health insurance<\/a>\u00a0or a 401(k) match.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a part-time employee at Walmart, and all of a sudden you can get $15 an hour, work full time, and earn full benefits by working for the federal government \u2014 wouldn\u2019t you? And, knowing that, wouldn\u2019t Walmart try to increase wages to keep you?<\/p>\n

Advocates say Walmart would. And they have some empirical evidence on their side from India, where a type of job guarantee known as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme functions largely as an insurance system, offering a source of income for rural farmers during the dry season.<\/p>\n

A group of economists \u2014 UC San Diego’s Karthik Muralidharan and Paul Niehaus and the University of Virginia’s Sandip Sukhtankar \u2014 collaborated with the former Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to randomize the roll-out of a new biometric card for participants in the rural employment program. The technology greatly improved access, but some subdistricts of Andhra Pradesh were randomly selected to benefit from it earlier than others. This randomization let the economists estimate the program\u2019s effects by comparing subdistricts that got much-expanded access to the job guarantee to ones that didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Their findings<\/a>\u00a0are astounding: the job guarantee, they estimate, increases earnings for low-income households by 13.3 percent. Ninety percent of that increase is due to higher wages and increased work in the private sector, not the job guarantee program itself. Just as job guarantee advocates would predict, the program bid up wages everywhere.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most surprising result was that the program not only increased wages, but increased employment in the private sector.<\/p>\n

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Two things could be going on here, according to Paul Niehaus, the UCSD economist who co-authored the study. One is that employers in India are so few in number that they have more power to set wages than is typically the case, a phenomenon known as monopsony power. Under monopsony, firms typically have a number of vacancies, since to fill them they’d need to raise wages not just for new workers but for existing workers too.<\/p>\n

Setting a minimum wage, either by statute or through a job guarantee plan, effectively forces the firms to pay more to everyone, which in turn drives more people to apply to work there, and fills the vacancies.<\/p>\n

Alternately, Niehaus notes that private sector could increase because the program “created productivity enhancing assets,” like roads. The work done in the program could actually be useful in a way that boosts productivity and employment across society. Other research has also found that the program\u00a0increase entrepreneurship<\/a>\u00a0by injecting cash into rural communities that workers can then use to start their own ventures.<\/p>\n

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HOW AN AMERICAN JOB GUARANTEE COULD WORK<\/h3>\n

Obviously, though, the Indian and American economies are quite different. The U.S. has no need to provide jobs as a secondary source of income for agricultural laborers and subsistence farmers; a lack of capital for small enterprises isn\u2019t a major factor holding back growth here. Instead, a U.S. jobs guarantee would have to come up with a constant supply of useful jobs that enrollees with a wide array of skills could do \u2014 and jobs that can grow and shrink in number, as the economy booms and busts.<\/p>\n

There are two big questions any program would have to answer.<\/p>\n

The first is whether the goal is truly for the government to give everyone a job, or just to give more people jobs. The Center for American Progress is wrestling with that question right now: \u201cDoes the job guarantee translate to the government acting as an employer of last resort, or does it mean guaranteeing sustained public funding for a target number of jobs over and above what we already have?\u201d asks Carmel Martin, the group\u2019s executive vice president for policy. CAP isn\u2019t sure yet.<\/p>\n

As an illustrative example, CAP\u2019s May position paper supposes that a public employment program should return the employment rate of prime-age workers without bachelor’s degrees to its 2000 level of 79 percent. That would require creating\u00a04.4 million jobs<\/a>\u00a0and would cost, CAP estimates, about $158 billion a year. It would also still fall short of guaranteeing every American a paying job.<\/p>\n

A recent\u00a0detailed plan<\/a>\u00a0from economists William Darity Jr., Darrick Hamilton, Mark Paul, and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, is far more ambitious \u2014 it calls for employing about 14 million people at the cost of $775 billion per year, paid for in part by greater tax revenue, reduced reliance on safety net programs like food stamps, and lower incarceration rates. Wages would start at $11.56 an hour or $24,036 a year, indexed to inflation, plus another $10,000 a year in health care and retirement benefits. Participants would also get paid family, sick, and vacation leave. And the jobs would be guaranteed, not limited to a set number.<\/p>\n

Still another\u00a0outline<\/a>\u00a0from economist Pavlina Tcherneva, a professor at Bard College and its Levy Economics Institute, would also provide a guarantee, and allocate enrollees across nonprofit organizations rather than having the federal government provide jobs directly. While Tcherneva doesn\u2019t go into this, such a plan would almost certainly amount to a massive subsidy to religious organizations, given how dominated the U.S. nonprofit sector is by local religious groups and charities.<\/p>\n

The second big question is what kind of work these workers would do. The Darity\/Hamilton\/Paul plan to employ 14 million people, for example, seems to envision pairing the guarantee with expansions to public services enabled by a larger government workforce.<\/p>\n

Jobs, the authors write, could include child care work or teachers\u2019 aides positions, and work for a new\u00a0postal banking division<\/a>\u00a0of the Postal Service, established to provide an alternative to predatory payday lenders and check cashing services for poor households not reached by traditional banks. The plan offers little description beyond that.<\/p>\n

Those are all pretty much permanent jobs. If a job guarantee were enacted in a recession, and many of the enrollees became child care providers, what happens when the economy improves and workers find jobs in the private sector? It wouldn\u2019t be tenable to eliminate a universal child care program because the economy improved. Nor, if the program employed bus drivers, would it make much sense to cut bus routes. Either the government provides child care and runs buses, or it doesn\u2019t; making how much child care it provides or how many buses are available dependent on the state of the economy would be odd at best and counterproductive at worst.<\/p>\n

Infrastructure work, also included in the plan, could be a more appropriate area for job guarantee labor. While ideally we\u2019d repair roads and bridges and rail lines as soon as they need it, in practice that rarely happens, and tying projects like those to economic trends might not be so bad. But implementing a real job guarantee plan would require thinking through how useful a large number of untrained workers would be for such projects and estimating how many could be productively put to use. Then, if that number is less than the stock of unemployed people during recessions, the government would still have to find other roles for people to fill.<\/p>\n

A plan would also have to distinguish between different groups of people benefiting. For the long-term unemployed and young workers new to the labor force, more permanent positions might make sense, as their difficulty getting work isn’t necessarily tied to a bad economy. But for people struggling in a recession, the program might be more useful if it encourages work-sharing and deters layoffs, rather than pushing previously employed people into new jobs that they might not be a good fit for.<\/p>\n

AMERICA\u2019S LAST EXPERIENCE WITH PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT<\/h3>\n

At this point, a job guarantee is more a clarion call than a specific policy. No one has a bill that could be readily implemented tomorrow, or even in 2021. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) comes closest with his bill, the\u00a0Humphrey-Hawkins 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act<\/a>, named after the largely failed 1970s bill pushed by civil rights activists and unions to enact a job guarantee. But Conyers\u2019s plan\u00a0isn\u2019t particularly detailed<\/a>, and leaves most of the implementation details up to states, local governments, not-for-profits, and other recipients of federal grants under the law.<\/p>\n

Working through the details on the job guarantee is crucially important, especially for political survival. American history shows that even a mostly effective program can become politically toxic.<\/p>\n

In the 1970s, amid economic malaise driven by the oil crisis, the federal government began funding job positions through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). The program got some $47 billion in funding from its passage in 1973 to its dissolution in 1982; in 1977, President Jimmy Carter started directing more and more of that money toward public sector jobs, until by 1978 some 725,000 people had public sector jobs through CETA.<\/p>\n

\u201cCETA\u2019s size,\u201d Temple University political scientist Gary Mucciaroni\u00a0, \u201cdwarfed not only the employment programs of the 1960s but the entire War on Poverty effort.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you believe job guarantee advocates, the program should have been politically durable and popular, as it tied benefits to recipients\u2019 willingness to work in the public sector and contribute to society.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t. Instead, among its many opponents, the program became synonymous with corrupt liberal governance \u2014 a \u201cvisible symbol,\u201d Mucciaroni writes, \u201cof what its opponents argued was the futility and failure of government attempts to solve social and economic problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLike any government program, there were problems \u2026 but by and large it was a pretty successful program that got people employed quickly,\u201d Carl Van Horn, a distinguished professor public policy at Rutgers and an expert on employment policy, told me. \u201cBut when Ronald Reagan was elected to succeed Carter, he announced that we had to get rid of this program \u2026 It was more about the symbol, of some people getting jobs to do things that weren\u2019t perceived as worthwhile.\u201d<\/p>\n

And to be clear, some people with CETA jobs were doing things that weren\u2019t worthwhile. Van Horn estimates that 5 to 10 percent of CETA projects were boondoggles or otherwise wasteful. But those projects are easy to publicize, and can be used to doom the program as a whole.<\/p>\n

When the next recession hit, in 1981 to 1982, the worst downturn until the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis, the CETA program was so \u201cradioactive,\u201d as Van Horn puts it, that no one really proposed trying mass public job creation again.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt also became intertwined with race,\u201d Brown political scientist and sociologist Margaret Weir notes. Joblessness was seen as a black problem, and blacks were seen as primary beneficiaries of the public sector positions created by CETA in cities.<\/p>\n

If CETA was effective but politically toxic, plenty of other public employment programs haven\u2019t even been effective. While job guarantee programs envision a broad, inclusive program that can integrate all participants into the broader economy, the result is often a program that serves people who can\u2019t get work anywhere else, and still can\u2019t get work anywhere else after the program is finished.<\/p>\n

Berkeley economist David Card recently conducted\u00a0a meta-analysis<\/a>\u00a0of more than 200 evaluations of programs meant to boost labor markets, along with fellow economists Jochen Kluve and Andrea Weber. While they found a variety of impacts of different programs, one constant was that public employment programs that simply hired people directly performed worst.<\/p>\n

\u201cPublic sector employment subsidies tend to have negligible or even negative impacts at all horizons,” the study concludes. “This pattern suggests that private employers place little value on the experiences gained in a public sector program.\u201d One reason, they suggested, was that the programs did nothing to help build skills that would make participants more employable.<\/p>\n

Job guarantee advocates counter that a well-designed program would get around these concerns. CAP\u2019s Martin argues that sound design would both permanently increase public employment, meaning unemployability in the private sector isn\u2019t a concern, and that it will involve training programs that can boost skills.<\/p>\n

Margaret Weir also expresses hope that a universal job guarantee could be more politically viable than the 1970s public employment program. \u201cThe jobs problem is perceived as a white problem now,\u201d she notes. \u201cI think that local government and nonprofits are more capable\/professional now than they were in the 1970s, and could more easily implement a jobs program.\u201d<\/p>\n

Van Horn, on the other hand, expressed skepticism, fearing the same factors could doom public sector employment this time around, especially America\u2019s fundamental uneasiness with direct government intervention into the job market. \u201cI\u2019d say it\u2019s more likely we\u2019d have a single-payer health care system than a guaranteed job program, and that\u2019s also a reach,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s a very long tradition in public policy and the history of this country that this is a lightly managed economy \u2026 The idea that the government would suddenly change after 200 years of not doing that, and certainly not in the modern era, I just don\u2019t think it\u2019s likely.\u201d<\/p>\n

All which means job guarantee advocates should be thinking seriously about the details. The experience with CETA is a reminder that the line between a brilliant idea and a political failure is narrow, and that funding even a handful of bad or bad-looking projects can easily doom a program.<\/p>\n

After the initial energy for public jobs and even a jobs guarantee in the 1960s and 1970s, \u201cthe flurry of new programs,\u201d Weir wrote in her 1992 book Politics and Jobs, \u201cwas followed only a few years later by disillusionment and a sharp scaling down of resources devoted to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Originally published by Vox<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

September 11, 2017 (Occupy.com) Imagine if a well-paying job, with benefits and a high enough salary to pay for rent, transportation, and food, were a human right. Imagine the U.S. federal government established a policy whereby anyone who didn\u2019t have a job and wanted one could go into a local… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6172"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6172"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6185,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6172\/revisions\/6185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}