COVID-19 Bailout: Cash without Jobs?
No. Secure jobs first and have cash as a form of guaranteed unemployment insurance. I’m talking about a Federal Job Guarantee at a public sector, unionized job.
Folks will say, “that’s like Clinton’s welfare work-requirements.” NO! Clinton abandoned the most vulnerable people in society to the most predatory private labor market. Clinton’s work requirements left folks to the ravages of a private labor market that has NEVER secured stigmatized communities fair wages and a say in their work conditions.
There is a lot of talk about rent forbearance and cash payments as a response to COVID-19, but we need to shore up productivity. Pipes still need plumbers, call services, including tele-health, still need to be supported, and that means that the infrastructure at the heart of our political economy needs to be shored up.
We’ve tried to organize a democracy in an industrial economy where 95 percent of the workforce are employees, and we’ve never instituted a Federal Job Guarantee to fill in the gaps. An advanced industrial economy means that the economy is shot through with material and cultural barriers to entry, so it’s not the case that anyone can open up a shop and expect to compete with Walmart or Southwest. This also means that every single person, as a rights-bearing citizen, needs a secure, productive place in civil society in order to participate in our market driven political economy. We need this productive place in civil society to secure the economic conditions of political independence. I’m not against markets. They insert a crucial dynamism required for self-determination. But markets also require a physical and cultural infrastructure, as well as recognized, productive participants. Without this Federal Job Guarantee, the nation hasn’t secured the economic conditions that enable political independence, which is the entire promise of the US revolution.
People should be able to quarantine knowing that when they emerge, their productive place in civil society, that is, their right to a job, is backed by the full faith and power of the US government.
Keep in mind that FDR’s New Deal created 4 million jobs in fewer than three months when what passed for information technology was a rotary phone and carbon paper. (Steven Attewell just wrote a great book on direct job creation.) These jobs would be neither“make-work" nor directly compete with the market, they would provide the material and cultural infrastructure that would enhance productivity that the private market itself is not organized to secure, e.g., Ford made cars, not ROADS. In India, such a program increased PRIVATE sector employment by producing productivity enhancing assets.
There are a few different arguments for a Federal Job Guarantee. I’m going to go with the central one first, even though it’s the hardest. I am a philosopher, and if you are reading this, consider this like eating your vegetables. The reason for our government’s existence is to secure self-determination for its citizens. However, self-determination is an attribute of a system, not a principle of an individual. What does that mean? It means that you don’t determine yourself, that is, give yourself properties, in a vacuum. Rather, you do it in a world. You don’t determine yourself in this world alone any more than the gazelles bounding along the savanna decide, freely, what they are going to do. The gazelle’s liberty is in every way conditioned by the fact that there are hungry lions everywhere who are manifestly indifferent to the gazelle’s aspirations. In which case, gazelles can’t self-determine themselves, and the gazelle’s behavior is determined by the predations of the lions.
Likewise, people can’t be free if they are interacting with a world that is determined by nature, or if the world is shot through with other people who have unmediated, hostile interests. So we’ve domesticated the world, including the humans in it, in order for it to enable the conditions for self-determination. Market-based civil society is one way we humanize the world, structuring it so that people produce goods and services for other people, according to what other people want, and thereby receive what they want from other people. This is fine as long as everyone has recognized power as a producer as well as a consumer. The problem is if you are just an everyday consumer, you can’t affect production within the system. And if you can’t affect production within the system, you end up buying whatever goods happen to be on the market at whatever prices they happen to be sold. Since you can’t affect market production, then the goods produced by the market are alien to your power.
This is also why it’s not enough for the workers to have jobs, the jobs must be unionized in order to affect production in a way that gains the recognition of the market. In addition, so that there are enough goods and services for the system of freedom to take hold, there needs to be mass productivity, with a dynamism of people spinning out and meeting each other’s needs and acknowledging having their needs met, in unpredictable ways, not merely mass consumption. The more ubiquitous and sustained socially empowered productivity is, the more the world and our interactions in it are transformed into a world that enables individuals to engage in self-determination through this system, rather than have activities governed by mere reaction to the fixed determinations of nature, like the gazelles in the savanna who, if thoughtful—which is not exactly in their nature-- are governed by the ever-presence of the lion.
We need a Federal Job Guarantee. We need to acknowledge, unionize and pay for much of the carework that gets in the primitive economy. For great piece on that, please read this.
But mostly, we need to understand that self-determination emerges as part of a system of productive interactions, of which our market-based civil society is one very important part.
If you want a deeper dive into this, go ahead and check out Richard Dien Winfield’s Freedom as Interaction in the volume, “Freedom and Modernity.”