The Problem With a Job Guarantee

The Problem With a Job Guarantee

Building working-class power through full employment is a worthy goal, but there are better strategies for creating and sustaining a tight labor market.

The time has come to abandon a political proposal that the left has advanced in Europe and the United States for almost 200 years: that the government should guarantee a job to everyone who is looking for work. While the goal of durably tightening the labor market is important, a federal job guarantee is a bad strategy for achieving that objective.

The demand dates back to at least 1848, when the early socialist Louis Blanc persuaded France’s provisional revolutionary government to establish public workshops that would provide employment to anyone looking for work. While the plan was not implemented effectively, the demand for government-created jobs for the unemployed became a part of many left-wing wish lists. It was in the platform of the U.S. Social Democratic Party in 1900, and the Unemployed Councils in the 1930s agitated for government-funded public works to pay the unemployed union wages. President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to this pressure by establishing the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and other employment programs.

As the Second World War ended, there was widespread fear in the United States that mass unemployment would return. The labor movement and its allies fought to pass full employment legislation that would guarantee jobs to everyone who wanted to work. The Employment Act of 1946 was passed after extended debate, but it kept only a rhetorical commitment to full employment.

This drama was repeated in the 1970s, when organized labor and civil rights leadership mobilized to pass a federal job guarantee as proposed by Augustus Hawkins in the House and Hubert Humphrey in the Senate. The legislation approved in 1978 was once again watered down to eliminate an actual federal job guarantee.

The idea of a federal job guarantee lives on today. It was included in the proposal for a Green New Deal that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues submitted to Congress in 2019, and it was also advanced by Bernie Sanders in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. The demand has been pushed by advocates of modern monetary theory and embraced by a number of African-American leaders. As recently as February 2024, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley offered a resolution in support of a federal job guarantee in honor of Black History Month.

Advocates for a job guarantee have persistently argued that unemployment and competition for scarce jobs fuel conflict between white workers and workers of color, both native-born and immigrant. Employers exploit these tensions to weaken or defeat worker organizing, and right-wing politicians have won elections by mobilizing racist and anti-immigrant anxieties.

If the government provided a decent job to everyone looking for work by managing a bank of job openings that would expand and contract in response to private-sector openings, the labor market would always be tight. Competition for decent jobs would be greatly ...