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WHAT ARE THE EXPECTED BENEFITS OF THE JOB GUARANTEE
• Full employment: The program eliminates involuntary unemployment (as defined) and drastically reduces the associated human hardships and social afflictions.
• Living income: The program raises the income floor. It stabilizes incomes at the bottom of the distribution both for workers within and outside the program by establishing a genuine living wage of $15 per hour.
• Alternative to bad jobs: It displaces “bad” labor practices and helps to eliminate “bad” jobs. If the public employment option offers a decent job at decent pay, employers who pay poverty wages with difficult working conditions would have to match the JG pay and conditions to retain workers.
• Establishes a “labor standard” for the economy as a whole: Because it guarantees that every person who wishes to work can find a public-option job with a living wagebenefit package, the JG establishes the labor standard that must be met by all employers in the private, public, or nonprofit sectors. Currently 18 percent of people who live in poverty work and 44 percent of homeless people work. The labor standard of the JG ensures that no working person would live in poverty.
• Inflation stabilization: The program serves as a superior inflation control and macroeconomic stabilization tool. Currently the pool of the unemployed fluctuates countercyclically. In the US the amplitudes of those fluctuations are especially large and, for a half century now, growth has delivered “jobless recoveries”. Many of those who are left behind either slip into long-term unemployment, involuntary part-time employment, or drop out of the labor force altogether. Since the JG’s primary objective is to provide jobs to those who want them at all stages of the business cycle, it has an inherent countercyclical mechanism that is superior to current inflation and macroeconomic stabilization methods. The JG expands and contracts with recessions and expansions, never allowing individuals and the economy to suffer the consequences of unemployment. As such it continues to stabilize economic growth and prices, using a pool of employed individuals for the purpose rather than a reserve army of the unemployed. It stabilizes the economy by supporting people, communities, and families, and not by rending them “disposable” as in the current paradigm.
• Improves income distribution: This is achieved in three ways: 1) the JG raises incomes at the bottom faster than incomes at the top; 2) the JG supports labor income, thus improving the distribution between labor and capital; 3) the JG improves the within labor income distribution, by supporting the income and employment opportunities of the lower-skill, less-educated worker and those who currently experience shorter job tenures, longer and deeper spells of unemployment, and poorer prospects of reemployment.
• Disrupts vicious labor market cycles: It breaks the above-mentioned vicious unemployment and income cycles experienced by those at the bottom of the income distribution.
• Cure: The JG improves the physical and mental health of the previously unemployed, as well as that of their spouses and children, and improves children’s educational performance and labor market prospects.
• Prevention: The program reduces suicides and mortality of JG workers, as well as the so-called “deaths of despair,” due to an overall improvement in labor market conditions.
• Economic, social, and environmental benefits: It reduces homelessness, recidivism, and economic crimes; increases the availability of public goods and services, which are provided through the JG program; and invests in the environment, people, and community.
• Full employment: The program eliminates involuntary unemployment (as defined) and drastically reduces the associated human hardships and social afflictions.
• Living income: The program raises the income floor. It stabilizes incomes at the bottom of the distribution both for workers within and outside the program by establishing a genuine living wage of $15 per hour.
• Alternative to bad jobs: It displaces “bad” labor practices and helps to eliminate “bad” jobs. If the public employment option offers a decent job at decent pay, employers who pay poverty wages with difficult working conditions would have to match the JG pay and conditions to retain workers.
• Establishes a “labor standard” for the economy as a whole: Because it guarantees that every person who wishes to work can find a public-option job with a living wagebenefit package, the JG establishes the labor standard that must be met by all employers in the private, public, or nonprofit sectors. Currently 18 percent of people who live in poverty work and 44 percent of homeless people work. The labor standard of the JG ensures that no working person would live in poverty.
• Inflation stabilization: The program serves as a superior inflation control and macroeconomic stabilization tool. Currently the pool of the unemployed fluctuates countercyclically. In the US the amplitudes of those fluctuations are especially large and, for a half century now, growth has delivered “jobless recoveries”. Many of those who are left behind either slip into long-term unemployment, involuntary part-time employment, or drop out of the labor force altogether. Since the JG’s primary objective is to provide jobs to those who want them at all stages of the business cycle, it has an inherent countercyclical mechanism that is superior to current inflation and macroeconomic stabilization methods. The JG expands and contracts with recessions and expansions, never allowing individuals and the economy to suffer the consequences of unemployment. As such it continues to stabilize economic growth and prices, using a pool of employed individuals for the purpose rather than a reserve army of the unemployed. It stabilizes the economy by supporting people, communities, and families, and not by rending them “disposable” as in the current paradigm.
• Improves income distribution: This is achieved in three ways: 1) the JG raises incomes at the bottom faster than incomes at the top; 2) the JG supports labor income, thus improving the distribution between labor and capital; 3) the JG improves the within labor income distribution, by supporting the income and employment opportunities of the lower-skill, less-educated worker and those who currently experience shorter job tenures, longer and deeper spells of unemployment, and poorer prospects of reemployment.
• Disrupts vicious labor market cycles: It breaks the above-mentioned vicious unemployment and income cycles experienced by those at the bottom of the income distribution.
• Cure: The JG improves the physical and mental health of the previously unemployed, as well as that of their spouses and children, and improves children’s educational performance and labor market prospects.
• Prevention: The program reduces suicides and mortality of JG workers, as well as the so-called “deaths of despair,” due to an overall improvement in labor market conditions.
• Economic, social, and environmental benefits: It reduces homelessness, recidivism, and economic crimes; increases the availability of public goods and services, which are provided through the JG program; and invests in the environment, people, and community.
