Читать книгу The Case for a Job Guarantee - Pavlina R. Tcherneva - Страница 10

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

– Seneca

“There are no guarantees in life” is a familiar refrain, as is “if you really want something, you have to work for it.” But what if what you really want is paid work – a decent, well-paid job? And what if you cannot find it because, well, there are no guarantees in life?

This is the paradox the Job Guarantee proposal aims to solve. It is a public policy that provides an employment opportunity on standby to anyone looking for work, no matter their personal circumstances or the state of the economy. It converts the unemployment offices into employment offices to provide voluntary public service work opportunities in a wide range of care, environmental, rehabilitation, and small infrastructure projects. The Job Guarantee is a public option for jobs.

The guarantee part of the proposal is the promise, the assurance, that a basic job offer will always be available to those who seek it. The job part deals with another paradox, namely that while paid work in the modern world is life-defining and indispensable, it has, for many, become elusive, onerous, and punitive. The job component in the Job Guarantee aims to change all that by establishing a decent, living-wage job as a standard for all jobs in the economy, while paving the way for the transformation of public policy, the nature of the work experience, and the meaning of work itself.

The Job Guarantee deals with two very specific aspects of economic insecurity: unemployment (intermittent or long-term), and poorly paid employment (precarious and unequal). There are other labor market problems such as wage theft, discrimination, poverty, and stagnant income growth. And there are other forms of economic insecurity too, such as the lack of affordable and high quality food, care, housing, and education, or a lack of protection from the ravages of climate change. While, in a certain sense, the Job Guarantee has a narrow and clear mission – to provide a decent job at decent pay to all jobseekers who come a-knocking – by its very nature and design it addresses a wide range of social and economic problems and helps deliver a fairer economy.

At bottom, the Job Guarantee is a policy of care, one that fundamentally rejects the notion that people in economic distress, communities in disrepair, and an environment in peril are the unfortunate but unavoidable collateral damage of a market economy.

The idea of using public policy to guarantee the right to employment is not new. Its long life and resilience stem from its deep moral content. It was affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights, it was a signature issue in the struggle for civil rights, and it is etched into many nations’ constitutions (inspired by the Universal Declaration). But its mandate remains unmet. In the US, the architects of the 1946 Employment Act and the 1978 Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act tried, but ultimately failed, to implement appropriate legislation to secure it. In the absence of a universal right to work, intermittent direct employment programs around the world have attempted, however imperfectly, to fill the void, many with perceptible success.

Today, the Job Guarantee has been hailed as “the single most crucial aspect of the Green New Deal,”¹ conveying that environmental justice cannot be delivered without economic and social justice. The Green New Deal and the Job Guarantee aim to resolve two seemingly distinct, but in fact organically inseparable, existential problems – those of climate change and economic insecurity. What good is a green future in which the dangers of global warming have abated, but families and whole communities continue to experience deaths of despair due to poverty, unemployment, and economic distress? And what kind of an economy would it be which made well-paid jobs available to all, but continued to exploit and devastate the natural environment on which we vitally depended?

Although the Job Guarantee predates the Green New Deal, it has always been green – from the days of Roosevelt’s Tree Army to modern proposals like the one outlined in this book – prioritizing environmental conservation and community renewal. The Green New Deal is an ambitious policy agenda designed to transform the economy and deliver a habitable planet to future generations. The Job Guarantee embeds economic and social justice into the scientific response to climate change; it is an indispensable part of the green agenda that would ensure that no one would be left behind in the transition. But it is also a transformative macroeconomic policy and safety net that would tackle decades-long labor market problems along with the dislocations that would emerge from the greening process. Put simply, the Job Guarantee ensures that, while we work to protect the environment and transform the economy, we have a policy that protects working people and transforms the work experience itself.

This book presents the Job Guarantee proposal and explains why it is critical to the climate movement. It also contends that, even after the Green New Deal has fulfilled its mission, a market economy would still require a Job Guarantee. This is because the program serves as an ongoing shock absorber and a powerful tool for economic stabilization, which is perhaps its most critical macroeconomic feature. It was absent in the era of industrialization, when paid work became the indispensable yet unreliable ticket to securing a livelihood. It was missing in the postwar era, when economic depressions were banished but unemployment was not expelled along with them. And it is lacking today, when neoliberal policies have weakened core worker rights, while policy makers stabilize prices on the backs of the unemployed. The Job Guarantee is a policy that was needed well before we irreversibly polluted the environment, and it is one that will still be necessary after we have cleaned it up.

The vision for the green Job Guarantee articulated here connects job creation to environmental conservation. It also defines green policies as those that address all forms of waste and devastation, including and especially those of our human resources. A green policy must remedy the neglect and squander that come with economic distress, unemployment, and precarious work in particular. As the late Nobel Prize winning economist William Vickrey argued, unemployment is “at best equivalent to vandalism,” bringing an unconscionable toll and ruin on individuals, families, and communities.² Yet conventional wisdom considers unemployment to be “normal.” Economists even call it “natural” and devise policies around some “optimal” level of joblessness.

The idea that involuntary unemployment is an unfortunate but unavoidable occurrence, and that there is an appropriate level of unemployment necessary for the smooth functioning of the economy, is among the great, unexamined myths of our time. It is also bad economics.

To make the case for the Job Guarantee policy, the book begins with a thought experiment before moving on to the diagnosis and economic analysis. It asks the reader to imagine what the Job Guarantee policy might look like in very practical terms and the impact it might have on unemployed people and their families. We consider under what circumstances someone might need to access the program and what kinds of projects could ensure that they would always walk out of the unemployment office with a basic living-wage job offer.

The reason for this approach is that unemployment has become far too abstract and paradoxically impersonal. Few things are as personal as losing one’s job, and yet most economists and policy makers talk about unemployment much like meteorologists talk about the weather. Unemployment is treated as if it were a natural occurrence, about which governments can do little beyond providing temporary protection like unemployment insurance. Millions might have to endure joblessness as the economy slogs through a prolonged recession, but when the weather clears unemployment will dissipate again. Still, the inevitable drumbeat of globalization and technological change dictates that some people will necessarily stay (structurally) unemployed. Or so the story goes.

Unemployment is thus de-personified and internalized as a tolerable natural occurrence in a globalized world. It has become common to personify it only when unemployed people are blamed for their own lot – another myth this book aims to debunk. When economic conditions are favorable, unemployment and poverty are often believed to be the result of poor initiative (jobseekers have not upgraded their skills), or some other individual moral failing (substance abuse, criminal record, “bad choices” of one kind or another). Unemployment is thereby reanimated, but not humanized.

Some readers may share this view and it is hoped that this book will change their minds. Even in the best of times, decent job opportunities are in short supply for a great many people, due to stacked circumstances beyond their control. The consequences are devastating, yet largely avoidable. The questions I want to raise are these: What if we devised a system that – rain or shine, “moral failings” or not – guaranteed job opportunities to anyone who wanted to work, irrespective of their experience, training, or personal situation? What would such an economy look like? Would the sky fall? Would it create economic conditions and consequences worse than the ones we already face? Or would it usher in a great many benefits that we may not have considered before? Would a world with a public option for jobs be any worse than one in which even the “good economy” leaves millions without decent employment? Or would it provide a new basis for economic security and stability?

To begin answering these questions, Chapter 1 makes a very simple proposal: to ensure that the unemployment offices (the so-called American Job Centers) begin to act as genuine employment offices that provide living-wage public service employment opportunities on demand.

Chapter 2 documents the many catch-22 situations unemployed people face in the labor market. It challenges us to think of the right to a job in the same way we think of the right to retirement security or the right to primary and secondary education. Modern fine-tuning policies (both monetary and fiscal) that treat unemployment as “natural” and “unavoidable” perpetrate the above-mentioned vandalism on people, communities, and the environment. Once we take into account its social, economic, and environmental costs, it becomes clear that unemployment is already “paid for” and the price tag is high.

Chapter 3 argues that guaranteeing employment represents a new social contract and macroeconomic stabilization policy that falls within a long tradition of government guarantees. By combining key features of other public options and price support schemes, the Job Guarantee would have transformative effects on the economy. It would establish a new labor standard with an uncompromising living-wage floor for all working people, while stabilizing employment, inflation, and government spending more effectively than current practice. It would also replace, once and for all, unemployment as an economic stabilizer. The chapter enumerates the other benefits of the Job Guarantee, including but not limited to its impact on state budgets, inequality, service sector employment, and the lives of those who do not seek paid work.

Addressing the question of cost, Chapter 4 provides the reader with a new perspective on affordability, and sheds light on why most guarantees are usually provided by the federal government. This chapter considers the economic meaning of the term “the power of the public purse,” and separates the real from the financial costs, as well as the real resource constraints from the artificial financial constraints. It also provides estimates of the size of the Job Guarantee budget and presents the results from a macroeconomic simulation of the program’s impact on the US economy.

Chapter 5 turns to the question of implementation and design and explains how the proposal offered here differs from others. It illustrates why the Job Guarantee is inherently green, and provides examples of specific projects that could be developed and managed using a decentralized and participatory model. It recommends that the Job Guarantee is organized as a National Care Act that prioritizes care for the environment, care for the people, and care for the communities. The chapter also addresses some frequently asked questions and highlights important lessons from similar real-world job creation programs.

The concluding Chapter 6 evaluates the program’s overwhelming popularity and symbiotic relationship with the Green New Deal. It clarifies the different uses of “guaranteeing jobs” that can be found in the climate discourse and situates the Job Guarantee proposal within the green agenda. It also explains why the Job Guarantee would still be needed in a zero-emissions world where temperatures have stabilized, and concludes with some thoughts about its role and place in the international policy architecture.