Federal jobs guarantee

[lpetrich]

Ayanna Pressley on Twitter: "A reliable job. A living wage.

A federal job guarantee lays the foundation for economic justice & freedom. (vid link)" / Twitter
With some video of AP herself explaining why a Federal job guarantee would be good.

Rep. Pressley, Economists, Advocates Unveil Historic Federal Job Guarantee Resolution | Representative Ayanna Pressley

Federal Job Guarantee Would Address Unemployment Crisis, Help Close Racial, Gender Income Gaps, Lay Foundation for an Equitable Economic Recovery

“It’s time to establish a legal right to a job for all people in America. For years, we have legislated hate, harm and injustice in this country. It’s long past time to pursue bold, intentional policies that affirm equity and recognize the dignity and humanity of all people,” Congresswoman Pressley said. “A federal job guarantee is an important investment in the American people, our communities, and an equitable economy that works for all. It affirms the right to meaningful, dignified work and a living wage. I’m proud to build upon and honor the legacy and work of generations of Black women Civil Rights leaders by introducing this historic resolution.”

The resolution itself: C:\Users\mmcrotty\AppData\Roaming\SoftQuad\XMetaL\11.0\gen\c\PRESMA~1.XML - Pressley Federal Job Guarantee Resolution vF.pdf (not yet in congress.gov)

Explanation of it: Pressley Federal Job Guarantee Resolution Summary.pdf

A federal job guarantee would provide every person with an enforceable legal right to a quality job on projects that meet long-neglected community,physical and human infrastructure needs, such as delivering quality care for children and seniors, building and sustaining 21st century transit systems, strengthening neighborhoods, and protecting the environment. Funded by the federal government and implemented locally in partnership with communities, the program would provide public jobs for all adults seeking employment.

...
Example job guarantee projects include:

• Ensuring the delivery of high-quality, professional care to children, seniors, and others in need of long-term support in family based, informal, and formal settings;
• Augmenting the staffing of public education and early childhood learning, including Head Start and preschool;
• Strengthening public afterschool programs, libraries, and recreational programs to provide lifelong learning and enrichment for people of all ages;
• Implementing community infrastructure and improvement projects that revitalize neighborhoods and increase accessibility, including:
  • Vacant and abandoned property cleanup; street and sidewalk repair; remodeling and modernization of schools and other public community-serving facilities; and maintenance and renovation of parks, playgrounds, and public spaces;
• Expanding emergency preparedness, and relief and recovery from natural and community disasters, including public health, natural disasters, and environmental emergencies
• Producing works of public art and documentation of American history akin to the WPA’s Federal Arts Project;
• Implementing environmental conservation, remediation, and sustainability initiatives and increasing the energy efficiency of buildings and our housing stock to address climate change;
• Rehabilitating and retrofitting our existing affordable housing stock to ensure safe, affordable, accessible, quality homes, and supporting the development of new affordable housing and social housing to address the nation’s housing crisis.
• Other projects that address public needs and can be implemented quickly.

This is dramatic. It's a big splash. It's like the New Deal and the Great Society again. I don't know how practical it is, and business lobbies are going to whine that it deprives them of low-paid workers, but it's worth considering. It could be a good alternative to policies like keeping people out of work for the sake of maintaining the value of money, the well-known inflation-unemployment tradeoff. That's bad enough, but what's worse about it is that its advocates are the same sort of people who grumble about how lazy unemployed people allegedly are, how they could get a job if they wanted to.

 

[lpetrich]

I first learned of some politician proposing it a little over 2 years ago:

AOC's first-primary campaign ad: The Courage to Change | Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - YouTube
Advocating Medicare for All, tuition-free public college, a Federal jobs guarantee, and criminal justice reform.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Won!
with
Improve and expand Medicare for All / A Federal Jobs Guarantee for a living wage, childcare, and paid leave / Reduce prisons & the prison population by 50% & Ending the War on Drugs / Protect and EXPAND Social Security, and tie increases to the real cost of living / Tuition-free public college and vocational school / Housing as a right for the many, not a luxury for the few / A simplified, welcoming path to citizenship, including abolition of ICE

Here's the platform that helped Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez make history
with
Medicare for All: medicine, vision, dental & mental health care / Universal Jobs Guarantee: serve our communities with living wages / Fully Funded Public Schools & Universities: plus taxing Wall Street to support tuition-free public universities and trade schools / Paid Family & Sick Leave: giving everyone the right to choose care / Housing as a Human Right: safe, secure, habitable, & affordable homes / Justice System Reform: end the War on Drugs, demilitarize our police and abolish for-profit incarceration / Immigration Justice: protect DREAMers & TPS recipients, simplify the paths to citizenship and abolish ICE / Infrastructural Overhaul: invest in 100% renewable green industry / Clean Campaign Finance: ending the corrupting influence of corporate finance in public elections / Economy of Peace: that supports our veterans and actively values all humanity

In response to Fox News presenting her platform:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Pretty much! (pic link)" / Twitter
with
Medicare for All / Housing as a Human Right / A Federal Jobs Guarantee / Gun Control & Assault Weapons Ban / Criminal Justice Reform, End Private Prisons / Immigration Justice & Abolish ICE / Solidarity with Puerto Rico / Mobilizing against Climate Change / Clean Campaign Finance / Higher Education for All / Women's Rights / Support LGBTQIA+ / Support Seniors / Curb Wall Street Gambling: Restore Glass-Steagall

Most of AOC's platform I agreed with, but a Federal jobs guarantee seemed rather odd and unmotivated.

She also mentions it in her platform of running for re-election last year: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for Congress

Medicare For All / Housing As a Human Right / Real Public Safety / Honor in Immigration / A Just Recovery for Puerto Rico / Elevate Public Education / A Peace Economy / Justice for Workers & Small Businesses / Green New Deal / Women's Rights / Support LGBTQIA+ Rights / Aging with Dignity

 

[ZiprHead]

Question.: Are there any other nations that offer national job guarantee rights?

 

[lpetrich]

I checked on AP's platform: Issues - Ayanna Pressley for Congress:

• Ayanna Pressley’s Federal Job Guarantee
• Standing with the LGBTQ+ community
• Foreign policy centered on empathy and the pursuit of peace
• Addressing the impact of violence and trauma
• Protecting the rights of cisgender and transgender women and girls
• Tackling entrenched healthcare disparities
• Confronting the climate crisis
• Expanding educational opportunity
• Imagining the future of transportation
• A just and humane immigration system
• Housing as a human right
• An economy that works for everyone
• Transforming our criminal (in)justice system

Ayanna Pressley's Federal Job Guarantee - Ayanna Pressley for Congress

A job that provides good wages, strong benefits, union protections & safe working conditions should be a legal right in America. The people deserve true economic justice, and that is why Ayanna Pressley filed an historic resolution calling for a federal job guarantee.

The idea that all people should have a right to employment that ensures a dignified standard of living has deep roots in American history and remains an unfulfilled demand of the civil rights movement. Amidst the unprecedented pandemic, the employment crisis and a resounding demand for a more equitable economy, the need to affirm the right to meaningful, dignified work and a livable wage has never been clearer.

The right to a “useful and remunerative” job was the first and most fundamental right in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights. Sadie Alexander, the nation’s first Black economist, advocated a job guarantee to address racial discrimination against Black workers while improving labor market conditions for all workers. Martin Luther King, Jr. called for guaranteed jobs, and Coretta Scott King led a grassroots movement in support of a federal job guarantee.

I checked some other "Squad" members. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Marie Newman, Mondaire Jones - no mention of a Federal jobs guarantee.

 

[jonatha]

Question.: Are there any other nations that offer national job guarantee rights?

India. At least for rural workers.

Google "india job guarantee"

 

[Trausti]

Question.: Are there any other nations that offer national job guarantee rights?

North Korea?

 

[Bomb#20]

...
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Won!
with
Improve and expand Medicare for All / A Federal Jobs Guarantee for a living wage, childcare, and paid leave /
...
Most of AOC's platform I agreed with, but a Federal jobs guarantee seemed rather odd and unmotivated.

Well, if you propose to prohibit people from having jobs in the $7.25-to-$14.99 range, but you don't intend to cause a lot of the people who would otherwise have jobs in the $7.25-to-$14.99 range to be unemployed, your options are pretty much limited to:

(a) a Federal jobs guarantee, or

(b) magical thinking.

 

[lpetrich]

Question.: Are there any other nations that offer national job guarantee rights?

Communist regimes had long had that sort of policy. In China, it was called the "iron rice bowl".

Some Communist regimes, like the Soviet Union, had laws against what those regimes called social parasitism, living off of the earnings of others without working.

Right wingers may say that this shows how evil Communism is, but they themselves often attack welfare recipients as social parasites.

 

[lpetrich]

Well, if you propose to prohibit people from having jobs in the $7.25-to-$14.99 range, but you don't intend to cause a lot of the people who would otherwise have jobs in the $7.25-to-$14.99 range to be unemployed, your options are pretty much limited to:

(a) a Federal jobs guarantee, or

(b) magical thinking.

As if there is some law of nature fixing the pay of those jobs in that range. I don't understand this weepiness.

 

[TV and credit cards]

It should be called a “federal work guarantee”. This way the “allegedly lazy” will know it’s a two way street. I worked in federal service with these people. I depend upon these people for VA healthcare. They put in more effort coming up with excuses for not doing their job than it would take to just get the job done. They exist and they are a cancer. While I’m all for a living wage, I am not for a federal paycheck guarantee.

 

[Jarhyn]

It should be called a “federal work guarantee”. This way the “allegedly lazy” will know it’s a two way street. I worked in federal service with these people. I depend upon these people for VA healthcare. They put in more effort coming up with excuses for not doing their job than it would take to just get the job done. They exist and they are a cancer. While I’m all for a living wage, I am not for a federal paycheck guarantee.

I'd rather a federal income guarantee, personally, mostly for this reason. Have a minimum rate and a personal rate. Those who regularly find work get their income at the personal rate. Those who have not found work regularly get UBI at the minimum rate. Perhaps have some system of quality rating that is engineered in such a way to expose abusive practices (like identifying when an employee/employer rates 0 stars on all employers/employees).


Problems would involve when an employer expresses racial bias, though that would be difficult to identify given that the tinkerbell effect has driven a truth behind the lie: black people are given low quality education, and this will ultimately be reflected in any such review demographics. This could potentially be identified by companies having different racial means and running a regression analysis on how distributions within the population and how their ratings deviate from the ratings of other companies per employee.

Then once we have identified who it is who is not working and isn't trying to work, at that point we can figure out what to do about it.

Perhaps offer personal rate increases (and personal rate activation) as a result of completing educational programs successfully, or continuing in education?

But anomaly detection aside, most people want to do useful work, even if most people publicly express a desire to be lazy. I would far rather implement a system where the people who don't want to be there don't have to be, and as a result, they just don't get as much.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It should be called a “federal work guarantee”. This way the “allegedly lazy” will know it’s a two way street. I worked in federal service with these people. I depend upon these people for VA healthcare. They put in more effort coming up with excuses for not doing their job than it would take to just get the job done. They exist and they are a cancer. While I’m all for a living wage, I am not for a federal paycheck guarantee.

And that's why an awful lot of them don't have a job--employers don't want them.

 

[steve_bank]

It ma come to tyat for several reasons.

W continue a steady stream of immigrants legal and illegal without language skills and education while the demand for unskilled labor goes down. In the 50s and 60s an immigrant could make a living supporting a family in unskilled labor.

That is no longer the case. W are creating a permanent underclass.

Add to that while we have a stream of immigration minorities born here are underemployed.

It comes down to social and civil stability. A growing population with nothing to do.

Conservatives think we are still in the 19th century where expansion and resources appeared to be endless. Progressives think our wealth is boundless not realizing what has created the wealth.

The capitol riot and rebellion is a glimpse at the future.

The system on the founding was based on the idea ifyou failed you went off somewhere and died unless you had family or friends to support you.

Break a leg and can't work you starve. Get sick you starve. Go west and fail you starve. That was the economic reality.

An example of Soviet full employment I remember was giving someone a job monitoring an escalator.

 

[Bomb#20]

Well, if you propose to prohibit people from having jobs in the $7.25-to-$14.99 range, but you don't intend to cause a lot of the people who would otherwise have jobs in the $7.25-to-$14.99 range to be unemployed, your options are pretty much limited to:

(a) a Federal jobs guarantee, or

(b) magical thinking.

As if there is some law of nature fixing the pay of those jobs in that range.

There isn't. What's your point? Are you under the impression that "The pay of those jobs isn't fixed by law of nature. I want the price to rise without the amount purchased decreasing. Therefore the price will rise without the amount purchased decreasing." is a valid inference? It's magical thinking.

I don't understand this weepiness.

What weepiness? I simply explained to you why AOC's proposal isn't "rather odd and unmotivated". You are making up psychology for your ideology's unbelievers out of whole cloth, in order to make an ad hominem argument, because you haven't got a better one to offer.

 

[steve_bank]

The problem is not in the imagining of high sounding grand ideas.

The problem is working out all the details to make it a working system. Our govt is demonstratively unable to do such planning. In contrast China has gotten very good at planning and executing to long term planning.