“Is there a limit to how much we can care for each other?”
That’s the radical question at the heart of economist Pavlina Tcherneva’s timely new book, ”The Case for a Job Guarantee,” due to be published this month.
The 128-page book went to print in December when the U.S. unemployment rate was near a postwar low of 3.5%. Yet that figure obscured the harsh realities of the economy it’s so often used to describe. Hallowed growth of the economy was less a rising tide than a wave that pummeled most and allowed a select few to surf.
Average real incomes for the bottom 90% of families fell from 2009 to 2012, the first three years of the post-Great Recession recovery. By 2017, that average was 2.2% lower than in 1997. And as wages continued their decades-long stagnation, planet-heating emissions soared and storms and fires grew more extreme, displacing thousands and threatening to send millions more fleeing in the years ahead.
Then came the coronavirus pandemic. By the end of May, 40.8 million Americans had filed jobless claims, representing roughly 1 in 4 workers in the labor force. As the virus ripped through nursing homes, the policy response in many states was to protect the private companies that run such facilities from liability. As the origins of the virus were revealed to be from wild animals ― offering yet another example of the threats rampant habitat and biodiversity loss pose to humans ― governments around the world, particularly the Trump administration, gutted environmental protections in a bid to spur private industries’ recovery.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Tcherneva makes the case that delivering on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s nearly century-old promise of a job for every American who wants one would both set a modern living standard and marshal the power of the nation’s workforce to do work that so desperately needs doing. Rather than provide dubiously enforceable incentives for for-profit businesses to meet urgent societal needs, pay Americans directly to do those jobs. Then, during cycles of economic growth, allow the private sector to pay higher wages and reap the benefits of workers with new on-the-job training.
The concept is popular. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) backed versions of a job guarantee during the Democratic presidential primary. When the left-leaning think tank Data for Progress polled the issue last summer, 55% of eligible voters supported guaranteeing a federally funded job to anyone who wants one, while just 23% opposed the proposal.
Tcherneva is a key figure in the movement known as Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT, which popularized the idea that inflation is the only real limit to federal spending ― that there is no way for the federal government to go broke when it prints its own money. In much the same way that the question of how to pay for the $2 trillion stimulus package Congress passed earlier this year was tertiary to its effects on people’s lives, I kept my hourlong interview with Tcherneva focused on the effects of guaranteeing a job rather than the theoretical and debatably important question of how affordable it is. (For more on that, you can read economist Stephanie Kelton’s new book on the subject, or watch this talk she recently gave with my colleague Zach Carter, or start reading researcher Nathan Tankus’s newsletter or check out the various MMT explainers online.)
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
To start, let me just read the opening line of your first chapter: “Unemployment? What unemployment?” What a difference a few months make.
Yes, indeed. In the way, I’m very glad that I wrote it in an environment of a very low unemployment rate because I was hoping to shake people’s kind of view of how we’ve normalized just millions out of work. And then the coronavirus crisis just forced many people to wrestle with this idea and consider, “You know, what if it’s me? What if it’s somebody I know?”
Briefly outline for us what exactly a federal job guarantee is?
In simplest terms, it’s a public option for jobs that provide base wages and benefits. If you’re not able to find work for one reason or another, you can be assured that you can go to the unemployment office, and you will be guaranteed a menu of options in public service that you can pick from and there will be an employment opportunity there.
What would it look like if you were implementing a job guarantee today?
Look, we have a very large-scale problem today. So all manner of employment and hiring is needed. We have some very concrete things to tackle, like the COVID crisis, that require public service. Dealing with a public health issue requires that it not be for commercial return. It requires a strong public sector to put in place logistical systems ― everyone talks about contract tracing ― but it is everything; schools reorganize, workplaces reorganize. We have to make sure the elderly are taken care of and health centers are adequately staffed. We need centers for the homeless and shelters for those escaping their abusers. It is the whole wide range.
But even before this pandemic, we’ve had a lot of communities in distress. We have folks that live in awful conditions and polluted communities that don’t have clean water. What