Why America Needs A Guaranteed Jobs Program

In 1935, already a handful of years into the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Hiring millions of unemployed American workers to complete various infrastructure and public-good projects such as maintenance of roads, building dams and the construction of parks and schools, the WPA constituted one of the most ambitious components of FDR's New Deal programs. Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA created nearly 8 million jobs. At its peak in 1938, the WPA provided paid jobs for 3 million unemployed adults, with unemployed youth also given work through their own division, the National Youth Administration.

The goal of the WPA was to provide one paid job for all families in which the breadwinner suffered long-term unemployment. The stated goal of public building programs was to end the depression, or at least alleviate its worst effects. Millions of people needed subsistence incomes. Work relief was preferred over public assistance because it was seen as maintaining self-respect, reinforced a strong work ethic, and kept skills sharp. Even though WPA wages were usually well below industry standards and kept millions only just above the poverty line, it was still a major improvement over the bread and soup-lines of the time. The WPA program ended on June 30, 1943 as a result of low unemployment due to the worker shortage of World War II.

There have been multiple attempts to reform and implement similar or improved Worker Development programs in the US since the WPA closed its doors, yet over time the federal government and most states have come to rely more on welfare assistance programs due to their relative ease of use and lack of need for a large administrative arm to upkeep their programs. Combined with a lackluster and poorly-updated welfare state, most Americans have instead been left exposed to the whims and trends of the private market and the unbridled boom and bust cycles it brings along with it.

The fact is, there's a better way to organize American workers and lessen the negative impacts of both recessions and labor shortages, and the idea dates back to the days of the WPA. In 1944 during his State of the Union Address, President Roosevelt advocated for a Second Bill of Rights, often known since then as an Economic Bill of Rights, which would guarantee for the American people: employment, living-wage incomes, fair prices for farmers, freedom for small businesses from unfair competition and monopolies, adequate housing, access to medical care, social security for the elderly, disabled and injured, and jobs training and higher education for all US citizens. While it seemed high-minded and unlikely to become law then, it seems almost further from the American consciousness today. Yet, many of these ideas have since been implemented successfully in nations around the world, and its time America takes a new look at these proposals.

In today's job market, for example, there is a phenomenon commonly referred to as the Great Resignation underway. Perhaps better described as a large-scale reshuffling of the jobs market after substantial changes made during the COVID-19 pandemic, the bottom line is millions of American workers have been changing jobs in an effort to improve their finances and work security. Despite this dynamism in the market, however, tens of thousands of relatively high-paying jobs in healthcare, law enforcement, trucking and various trades have either remained available or grown in number over recent years. While low wages in trucking and increasingly negative public perception of law enforcement can explain some of these job vacancies, one of the top reasons for these chronic job openings is an insufficient network of infrastructure to train people for these positions.

While the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act passed in 2014 enacted many needed reforms and enhancements to the Workforce Development system throughout the US, it doesn't go nearly far enough to guarantee the sort of job-training flexibility and full-employment rate America could achieve if the system were properly funded and implemented. There have been several proposals and presented frameworks over the years to guarantee employment to all Americans, yet so long as something akin to a National Employment Administration is created, fully funded and properly empowered, America has the opportunity to greatly reduce the drag of its welfare system and maintain one of the most flexible and well-trained workforces in the world.

The primary agents for such a widescale and encompassing jobs program should undoubtedly be city and community colleges. Already designed to provide professional certificates, subsidized job training and associates degrees, greater funding for creating job training programs combined with federal tax credits to small businesses and trade organizations to facilitate tying in job training with subsidized or paid apprenticeships would provide a huge boon to the American workforce over time. A guaranteed jobs program would create a true floor for American incomes, guaranteeing living wages are available to all. Such a federal program would also nearly eliminate involuntary unemployment, cause working poverty to essentially disappear, give workers in every industry greater bargaining power, improve worker's livelihoods around the nation, decrease the drain of welfare expenditures while increasing taxable incomes at a local, state and federal level, allow the country to better maintain and develop our national infrastructure, help dampen the negative impacts of job losses during recessions, train workers to go where work is needed during labor shortages, and provide for the public good by ensuring there's a more equalized demand and supply paradigm in the economy, thereby helping keep deflation and inflation in check.

In short, there are many reasons why a guaranteed jobs program in the US would be incredibly beneficial to us all, and very few downsides given to us on the backend. In fact, the estimated cost of implementing such a program up-front is around $600 billion per year, far less than our annual military expenditures, and that number doesn't account for the lower costs of welfare payouts and increased tax revenues into government coffers. The program is estimated to keep an additional 8-10 million American workers employed per year and would increase GDP growth every year it's implemented. The program would also help alleviate income inequality and decrease pay and wealth gaps between the various ethnic and economic groups across America. While our social safety net should very much be kept in place, if not reformed and expanded as necessary, a federal jobs guarantee and related programs would help ensure fewer Americans than ever need safety net services, and would help revitalize working-class America in a time of increased automation, offshoring of jobs and increased need for college education just to make ends meet.

A guiding philosophy of the American labor movements of the late 1800s and early 1900s was that no one should need to get a college degree in order to earn a good, living wage. Over the decades that goal has become ever more difficult to realize, yet with the right investments into the American workforce, and even more so if we revitalize union membership and give all citizens guaranteed access to healthcare, we can realize this guiding philosophy once again. It's time to rebuild the American Dream and ensure it's still standing for future generations.


References:

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights#:~:text=His%20remedy%20was%20to%20declare,rights%20to%20a%20fair%20income

3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_socialism

4) https://www.cbpp.org/research/full-employment/the-federal-job-guarantee-a-policy-to-achieve-permanent-full-employment

5) https://www.sunrisemovement.org/theory-of-change/what-is-a-federal-jobs-guarantee/

6) https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/wioa

7) https://www.uti.edu/blog/education/trade-school-vs-college-vs-community-college

8) https://tcf.org/content/report/expanding-free-college-build-job-training-guarantee/?session=1

Location: California, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

America Should Dissolve the Presidency and Senate

Image
Prior to the presidential election of 2016, a majority of Americans reasonably presumed politics would continue more-or-less as usual. After decades of frustrating yet rather consistent Neoliberal politics stretching back to the Reagan Administration of the 80s, wherein both major political parties seemed more like different sides of the same policy coin rather than ideological opposites, discontented populist wings within both parties were clearly growing in prominence. Yet, left-leaning progressives and rightwing nationalists alike remained unable to capture the majority of the vote from their respective sides, let alone coax enough moderates and independents in the ideological middle to win the White House. That all changed, however, with the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States. Since his ascension to the Oval Office, America's political discourse has been treading dangerously close to the edge of losing the democratic republic we hold dear. Sadly...
Read more

Every American Should Have Basic Needs Guaranteed

Image
The United States of America has long been a nation of free enterprise and personal freedoms, the land of opportunity and protector of huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Yet, America is also a nation founded largely upon stolen land, much of it built by enslaved peoples and exploited immigrant laborers, where industrialists, tech tycoons and wealthy folks of all shapes and sizes have wielded huge and corrupting levels of power and influence for most of our history. Greed and exploitation has defined America just as much as freedom and prosperity has, yet the powers-that-be overwhelmingly push to remind us of the latter traits over the former. In fact, if one points out the rampant corruption and greed inherent in our current system, or makes an effort to discuss our history in its truer form, they are often labeled 'un-American', 'unpatriotic', 'socialist', 'woke' and any number of other politicized slurs used over the years to dampen dissent and p...
Read more

Why America Needs Guaranteed Healthcare

Image
For over 100 years, the United States has had various grass-roots movements attempting to implement and expand universal health insurance coverage. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, campaigns backed by progressives and socialists to pass universal healthcare legislation were opposed and blocked not only by conservatives, but eventually their own allies in labor unions due to the union's collective fear of losing power over paid-benefits (and thus their usefulness) in an era before there were legal protections for organized labor. While many European nations were beginning to provide 'sickness insurance' and subsidizing mutual benefit societies which helped workers cover medical costs, America's struggle for any forward momentum on the subject led to the issue being handed over to individual states. The states in turn mostly handed the responsibility over to private insurance companies and non-profits, a practice they've perfected through the decades. Throughout...
Read more