Responses to Fred Block
Responses to Fred Block
Two responses to “The Problem With a Job Guarantee.”
Our Fall 2024 issue features an article by Fred Block on “The Problem With a Job Guarantee.” Below are two responses to the article, along with a reply from Block.
Jobs Are a Source of Meaning
Fred Block has written an admirable critique of the job guarantee idea from the left. He raises valid concerns about the technical weaknesses of certain job guarantee proposals, and he offers a number of laudable alternative policies that he finds preferable. Yet according to the criteria he uses to judge the job guarantee, none of his alternatives are any better.
For instance, increasing permanent public-sector work (a great idea) does no more to challenge the notion of “market justice” than a job guarantee does. Allotting funding for training (another great idea) does not help us acknowledge the reality “that human beings depend on complex networks of caregiving” any more than a job guarantee does. Shortening the work week (one of the very best ideas) does not seem any less likely to provoke unified business class opposition than a job guarantee does.
What gives? The deeper problem for Block, it seems, is not technical but philosophical, concerning the role of work in modern society. He believes that the political exaltation of work results in the ideological affirmation of capitalism.
According to Block, the job guarantee fails as a political demand in large part because it does not challenge the idea that “labor is just another commodity,” and it reinforces “the belief that the market produces inherently just outcomes.” But is this so? Examined another way, the demand for guaranteed work is a demand to contribute to society despite the obstacles imposed by the market. Those revolutionary workers in 1848 were not demanding to be treated like commodities to be bought and sold like “steel or wheat.” Instead, they reasoned that if the government guaranteed employment, the market would lose its role as the primary mechanism through which work was distributed.
The same year, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels demanded the “equal liability of all to work.” Surely, the authors of the Communist Manifesto were not interested in reproducing the logic of “market justice,” as Block accuses job guarantee advocates of doing. They did not see the demand for jobs as affirming the notion “that any would not work, neither should he eat.” Instead, they sought to realize the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”
Jobs matter. Work matters, and not just as a source of income. Jobs provide a major source of meaning in our lives. In 2005, L. Randall Wray and Pavlina R. Tcherneva interviewed the beneficiaries of Argentina’s Plan Jefes y Jefas de Hogar Desocupados (Program for Unemployed Heads of Households), a successful but temporary job guarantee policy that was eventually replaced by a simple cash transfer program. Of all the beneficiaries they interviewed, not a single respondent said they would prefer a no-strings-attached cash payment over work in the jobs program. Even if they did not lose any income (and gained a whole lot of free time), respondents complained that they would feel useless if they were not working. That same depressing feeling of idleness was prevalent during the pandemic. Even when unemployment checks replaced our incomes, they did not replace the feelings of cooperation and contribution that jobs provide. As a result, a widespread sense of social alienation set in, and we are still grappling with its profound consequences, from drug abuse to mass loneliness.
For all these reasons, the left should talk about jobs a lot more. Unfortunately, right now, we almost never do. In 2022, the Center for Working-Class Politics assessed the campaign talking points of all Democratic congressional primary candidates. Less than 30 percent of Democrats focused on jobs in their rhetoric. Less than 5 percent campaigned on bold, progressive jobs-based policies like raising the minimum wage or implementing a job guarantee. That gives the right a near monopoly on talking about jobs.
Of course, in a better society, jobs would be better and more predictable, with shorter work weeks and higher wages. But getting to that society requires recognizing the importance of jobs in people’s lives and accepting that, for the vast majority of people, the demand for guaranteed work is not a surrender to “market justice” but a bulwark against it.
—Dustin Guastella
Public Jobs and Full Employment
Fred Block raises serious questions about the logistics of a job guarantee. There are better ways, he argues, to achieve full employment.
I partly agree with Block, at least in the short run. But he is too dismissive of public jobs programs, and his alternative program for achieving full employment is incomplete.
Block downplays the importance of public jobs programs by implying that they were not very significant in reducing unemployment during the Great Depression. He accepts the common view that, as the New Deal programs started, unemployment fell from 25 percent in 1933 to 20 percent in 1935, and then to a little under 15 percent in 1937 under the WPA, remaining in double digits until the beginning of the Second World War. This narrative is wrong.
As explained by the late Steven Attewell in his important and underrecognized book People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan, economic statistics in the 1930s did not count those who worked in public sector New Deal jobs as employed! If WPA workers are counted as employed, a different story of the Great Depression and the New Deal emerges: unemployment drops to 9.2 percent in 1937, a 40 percent decline from its peak, and to 6 percent by the eve of the war. As Attewell writes, “is it not more accurate to say that the New Deal, rather than the war, ended the Great Depression?”
Block points out that some of the problems with public jobs programs were evident the last time the United States had one. During the Carter administration, CETA employed 750,000 people, yet even supporters of the program acknowledge that it was plagued by mismanagement and abuse, which led to widespread media coverage portraying CETA as a boondoggle.
In her book Politics and Jobs, Margaret Weir described the problem with CETA as “expansion without institution building.” Neither the Department of Labor nor localities were organized to manage a public employment program. Now, almost half a century later, when labor market institutions have further atrophied and government capacity has been hollowed out, can anyone believe we have the capacity to implement a job guarantee?
The conclusion should not be to give up on public jobs and a job guarantee, but to build the labor market institutions that would make them possible: a federal agency to finance and manage the program and local planning councils to define local needs and priorities.
Block’s alternative policies to achieve full employment are all worthwhile, but he strangely does not mention the most important factor: an expansive fiscal policy that ensures demand is high enough to support full employment. The difference between the torturously slow economic recovery under Obama and the more robust recovery under Biden can be explained by the fact that Obama prioritized deficit reduction while Biden prioritized fiscal expansion to reach full employment.
A public jobs program can be an important tool to ensure full employment. Block proposes a mini-program—a permanent civilian conservation corps that would provide two-year jobs for 100,000 people—which he suggests could be ramped up during downturns. It’s a start, but we should be building the institutions that would support a much more ambitious program.
—Mark Levinson
Fred Block Replies
I am grateful to Dustin Guastella and Mark Levinson for their thoughtful responses to my article. While they continue to favor a government job guarantee, there are areas of agreement. Guastella points out that jobs “provide a major source of meaning in our lives.” I agree, which is why I stress that creating and maintaining a tight labor market should remain a central goal for the left. My point is that government employment schemes have often produced degraded and punitive jobs that do not deliver meaningful experiences. Moreover, other pursuits can also be meaningful, as when people gain new knowledge and skills, when they care for family members, and when they engage in volunteer activities. That’s why we need to challenge the view that paid employment is the only legitimate source of income for those without trust funds.
Levinson usefully notes that I relied on flawed data in analyzing the impact of New Deal jobs programs on the unemployment rate. Nevertheless, the point remains that even with the heroic scale of these programs, they still fell short of the job guarantee promise of providing jobs for everyone out of work. I also agree with him on the importance of expansionary fiscal policy in tightening the labor market.
We all share the view that the left should be talking much more about jobs and about public jobs programs. I suspect that we would all favor the creation of a federal housing corps that could train young people in construction and put them to work across the country building affordable housing.
But it is a fantasy to imagine that the labor market problem would be solved once and for all by the government passing a single piece of legislation. Opportunities for significant economic reform in the United States occur very rarely because of the multiple veto points that can block progress. It would be tragic if at the next such opportunity, the left once again pushed for something that was unlikely to be approved or, even if it passed, unlikely to endure. We should be organizing people instead around a series of more winnable demands that would bring us closer to a durably tighter labor market.
Dustin “Dino” Guastella is director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 and a research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics.
Mark Levinson worked in the labor movement for thirty-seven years as an economist for the United Auto Workers, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, UNITE-HERE, and the Service Employees International Union. He is the book review editor at Dissent.
Fred Block’s newest book, The Habitation Society: Creating Sustainable Prosperity, will be published in December 2024.
