A direct approach
No amount of growth can eliminate the job shortage that exists in virtually every country. Conventional policies have failed as well. The job guarantee is the landmark policy innovation that can secure true full employment, while stabilizing the economy, producing key social assets, and securing a basic economic right.
Full employment and decent work for all
Growth does not create enough jobs. Conventional economic policies haven’t either. While the private sector creates the majority of employment opportunities, it is neither its mission nor its responsibility to provide jobs for all. Worse, in the current policy framework, unemployment is used for price stabilization, which in turn creates structural precarity, economic insecurity, and social instability. Full employment has lost its meaning.
The job guarantee is an open-ended direct approach to employment creation for those who are left behind, thus securing true full employment over the long-run.
Economic stability
The full employment economy is necessarily a more stable economy. It is an investment in a strong economy and a more prosperous nation. In the current policy framework, unemployment is used for economic and price stabilization, which in turn creates structural precarity, economic insecurity, and social instability. The conventional approach produces and accepts large economic, social and political costs.
The job guarantee is a departure from the conventional approach in the following ways:
- It aims to stabilize employment, not aggregate spending.
- It serves as an automatic stabilizer (growing with need and shrinking when the economy improves) and does not use the NAIRU for price stabilization.
- It enhances price stability by stabilizing the floor to wages, behaving ani-cylically and producing services that absorb the wage.
- It is preventative, permanent, and open ended. By stabilizing employment, it prevents the spread of unemployment from mass layoffs throughout the community, thus stabilizing incomes of both families and the businesses they patronize.
- It reduces the existing social and economic costs of unemployment and helps address inequality.
Closing the jobs gap prevents the spread of unemployment throughout the community from mass layoffs. It prevents the larger social costs caused by employment precarity. Families and businesses can count on stable incomes. The job guarantee addresses inequality by raising the floor and ensuring access to market income.
Social and environmental assets
Public service employment targets social and environmental needs, the areas that are often under-provisioned. The job guarantee fosters broad-based civic engagement, allowing participants and community members to identify needs, propose projects, and actively engage in their execution. The job guarantee’s projects will address pressing social needs, from care work to food security, with guidance from community members. Guaranteed dignified living wage employment is an inoculation for the large but unaccounted for public health costs of unemployment, poverty, and the resulting deaths of despair.
Poor and disenfranchised communities all too often suffer the greatest impact of pollution, environmental degradation, and climate change. As a public services program, the job guarantee also focuses on environmental rehabilitation to create safer, healthier, more ecologically sustainable communities. The job guarantee is a crucial tool in building the environmental and social assets to make towns and cities around the world resilient to climatic and economic change.
Human rights
The right to full, productive employment is listed in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; the International Labor Organization’s Employment Policy Convention; and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. If private markets cannot provide true full employment for all workers who desire dignified living wage work, then the state becomes the employer of last resort. Guaranteed employment would be made a legally enforceable right, imposing on Governments an obligation of result – to provide decent work to all individuals able and willing to work. This is the idea of a job guarantee.