“The federal jobs guarantee is an idea that demands to be taken seriously.” — Cory Booker (D-NJ), likely 2020 presidential candidate, and Gob Bluth impersonator.
Over the past week I read or listened to a few prominent Democrats (Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Jon Favreau of Pod Save America, etc.) flirt with supporting a federal job guarantee as a way to address uniquely 21st century labor market issues. This FDR-like, simple-sounding policy would promise a job to every American, though the details need to be ironed out. Such a guarantee would inject economic activity into communities that have struggled to recover after the Great Recession, and it would sidestep discrimination by guaranteeing work to everyone, regardless of gender, sex, race, or disability. From what I have seen, the amount paid often would vary between minimum wage to $20 per hour, and it gives bargaining power back to workers as they could leave poor jobs for a guaranteed one. Further, it provides a chance for folks at the bottom of the income scale to secure stable income and thus introduce a newfound level of predictability and security in their lives.
There are many ways to achieve this federal jobs guarantee. The simplest version would be to tell unemployed folks to go to city hall each day and get their job assignment doing community betterment projects, like installing public art or picking up trash or filling much needed roles as home health aides, child care workers, or other in-demand jobs, but this is not the only way to enact a job guarantee. We could utilize clever tax credits to pay workers who take a position with a local small business, and we could frame the job guarantee as a sibling to a Participation Income, where currently unpaid, valuable work like caring for loved ones, enrolling in education, or receiving job training would also count as a job and thus would be paid work.
I view the federal jobs guarantee as a step in the right direction, but it fails to go far enough. Don’t get me wrong–it is refreshing to hear a forward-thinking debate over new labor market policies, and I would be glad to see it enacted, but this Underwoodian solution doubles down on America’s fetishization of work as the sole path to human dignity and economic security. And in order to effectively implement this job guarantee, the bureaucracy needed to create, monitor, and evaluate these guaranteed jobs would be suffocatingly paternalistic and would likely lead to a huge budget (although I do not believe we need to detail plans for how to pay for every new program when the GOP passes a trillion dollar tax cut without any plan to pay for it).
I believe that we need to disassociate work from income. The idea that you need to get a job in the labor market in order to earn an income inevitably ignores valuable unpaid work and leads to low-wage, routine jobs that should be automated so that we can focus our energy, planning, and “work” on our passions. If we implement a jobs guarantee, and an unemployed person reports to city hall and is assigned a job to pick up trash in the community, is that really more valuable than having them care for a sick loved one? It would be nearly impossible to match each person with a job they want to do–it would be difficult to consider each person’s geography, qualifications, and interests, and unfortunately, I think it would be demeaning to human dignity in the long run.
Instead, I hope that we take the funds we would allocate to a universal jobs guarantee and put it towards a universal basic income (UBI). UBI refers to an unconditional, nonwithdrawable income paid to every individual as a right of citizenship. Men, women, children, and pensioners, regardless of wealth or employment status, receive a basic income with no means test or work requirement. The only income difference arises from an individual’s age: a child’s basic income would be lower than an adult’s, with a pensioner’s basic income even higher. A UBI achieves every goal that a job guarantee reaches without installing a restrictive work requirement.
If a recipient of UBI decides to put their energy into painting or computer coding or whatever their passion is, should that not also be considered work? I hold a more optimistic view of humanity than many advocates of a jobs guarantee seem to hold, as they often argue that a UBI would lead to complacency, sloth, and laziness. But in fact, in the minimum income experiment in Canada in the 1970s, the only groups of people who worked less were mothers who had just had a child and young adults who chose to stay in school longer. These are two groups who rightfully should not be in work.
But we also have to consider two different future scenarios for this debate: pre- and post-technological automation. Pre-automation, the Canada experiment shows that in current society a UBI does not promote sloth. We see this in India and Namibia as well, where UBI pilot projects found a tremendous increase in income generated by entrepreneurship. People know how to spend their money better than the government does, and people understand what market opportunities exist in their economy better than the government would via a jobs program. Post-automation, we should assume that participation in the economy is restricted to a small subset of humanity. In this scenario, would you rather have a UBI or a jobs guarantee? I fear that a jobs guarantee would be humiliating, as humans would be doing routine work like cleaning solely for the purpose of receiving an income. Instead, I believe a UBI would allow us to enjoy the freedom of technological automation and would grant us the opportunity to “work” on our passions.
And while I am partial to the arguments for a Participation Income, the argument I have against it is based in efficiency–are you really going to file paperwork and have someone prove that they are taking care of their sick relative? The bureaucratic expense is too much in my mind, when a UBI would achieve the same result with less paternalism.
I understand the advantages of a universal job guarantee, and I would love to see it put in place as a step in the right direction, but I do not believe we will successfully react to our 21st century reality until we implement a universal basic income.
Purple State Progressive 
