This week marks publication of The Case for a Job Guarantee, @ptcherneva's brilliant, lucid pamphlet laying out the case for a radical rethinking of work and the creation of a true minimum wage: the wage you'll earn if you want a job but no one will give one to you.
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Today, the @latimesbooks published my interview with Tcherneva, in which she explains and expands upon her argument:
latimes.com/entertainment-…
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latimes.com/entertainment-…
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As she points out, governments guarantee all kinds of things: contracts, loans, even the price of cheese. But the one area of uncertainty that each of us has to face on our own, without any kind of price-floor, is our own ability to find meaningful, well-compensated work.
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Such a program would be federally funded - the feds alone have the power to spend money into existence - but it would be locally administered by states and localities, who would solicit proposals for work from community groups and bank them against future downturns.
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When you need a job, the employment office would just...employ you. Give you a choice of jobs, with training if necessary, from among things your own community has decided needs doing, especially environmental rehabilitation and care work.
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Today, we are facing down years - maybe decades - of structural unemployment at unmanageably high levels, 25% or more, far higher even than the absurd "natural rate of unemployment" that economists insist we must maintain.
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Unemployment is supposed to fight inflation, and perhaps it does, but so too can employment. Rather than maintaining a buffer stock of immiserated, traumatized, job-seeking workers, we can maintain a stock of good jobs with socially inclusive wages and good benefits.
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We already fund unemployment - the huge costs that structural unemployment exacts on our society and our productive economy - so why not switch to funding EMPLOYMENT instead?
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As we head into this period of long term, high unemployment, SOMETHING will give. Possibly we'll do nothing, and our society will be so destabilized by poverty and unemployment that it will face collapse.
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Or if the right gets its way, we'll create workfare - that is, forced labor: "Don't want to starve? Fine - build the border wall and we'll feed you."
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The alternative is a Job Guarantee: an add-on beyond benefits for people who can't work, that buys the labor of people whom the private sector refuses to employ and puts it to work doing things their own communities need.
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