Job Guarantee versus Work Time Regulation

Job guarantees versus work time regulation

Recently, job guarantees have re-emerged among post-Keynesian economists as a way of achieving a more direct labor market intervention than fiscal stimulus alone (Wray 1998). Also known as the buffer stock employment model, the program posits that government manages a buffer stock of unemployed workers by providing jobs to all those willing and able to work for a living wage. The chief virtue of a job guarantee is its ability to quickly create jobs. A government policy of directly employing the jobless could certainly be viewed as expedient. It is also likely to be the most appropriate fiscal spending target for developing countries suited to Abba Lerner’s “Functional Finance,” as it can ensure adequate spending levels during slack times and reduced spending during robust economic activity. Accordingly, a buffer stock employment program represents a vast improvement over the current application of the “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment” (or NAIRU) in assisting developing countries to target the proper level of government spending needed to achieve low unemployment with minimal risk of demand-pull inflation. For the industrialized democracies of the world, however, a buffer stock model has many important disadvantages relative to a regulation of work hours. In light of the drawbacks delineated in this section, an alternative labor market policy that uses the government’s fiscal prowess and regulatory powers to influence the social effort bargain surrounding working time may be a more effective, sustainable and certainly more equitable, way of increasing socioeconomic participation.

One of the most troubling aspects of job guarantees is the promotion of greater work and consumption. By furthering the “work fetish” and the “gospel of consumption,” a job guarantee strengthens and expands the capitalist’s sphere of influence in everyday life (Cowdrick 1927). With its emphasis on more remunerative employment, as governed by exchange value, the buffer stock employment model addresses the social ill of unemployment by introducing what many would consider another social pathology—growth of the consumer culture. Perpetuating the market mentality by expanding aggregate work hours further strengthens the capitalists’ position in the dialectic struggle between capital and labor and represents a contraction of the worker’s “space for development” (Marx 1991: 493).

Like nearly all macroeconomic policy since the Industrial Revolution, the buffer stock model is guided by the pursuit of economic growth and paid work. The buffer stock is designed to absorb employment from the private sector and employ the workers at similar tasks so that they can be rehired by private firms at a later stage. By virtue of the fact that the buffer stock model temporarily employs workers until they can be rehired by the private sector, the program will have to offer jobs that are of private value, but not necessarily public worth. The activities undertaken by buffer stock workers will have to be governed by exchange value rather than use value. This precludes public good functions (such as environmental clean-up), leaving activities that were previously provided by households or the community via the third sector as prime candidates for “privatization.” As such, the operation of a buffer stock expands output and the reach of the market, bringing with it the potential for relative public decay, environmental damage, growth of a consumer culture and inflationary pressures. Joan Robinson, one of the earliest “post-Keynesians,” was herself solicitous of suffering a work fetish. Robinson (1969: xi) pondered the zealous pursuit of employment growth:

If we are to be guaranteed full employment in any case, the question to be discussed is what the employment should be for. Do we want more investment or more consumption? If more investment, should it be in the infra-structure of industry – the supply of power, transport and communications – should it be in private profit-seeking business or should it be in the improvement of social services – education, health, housing – and general amenities? If more consumption, should it be to reduce poverty or to give everyone a proportionate share? These deep divisive questions are smoothed over by the making of employment an end in itself.

In terms of Keynes’s three ingredients for full employment, a buffer stock model (as distinct from permanent public sector employment) owes its success at achieving full employment largely to the “first aid” of greater consumption. In a post-industrial setting, however, any policy dependent on more consumption is likely to inflame the social and ecological costs of indiscriminate economic growth outlined in Chapter 4.

A buffer stock scheme essentially redefines unemployment by expanding the functions of paid work. Since the buffer stock is not limited to the permanent employment of workers in the provision of public goods, it will have to expand the social definition of acceptable market work. It is not denied that greater throughput, at some magnitude, could eventually reduce unemployment to inconsequential levels. Yet, in a post-industrial economy of declining job opportunities, the redefinition of work and consequent expansion of output will have to be both prodigious and perpetual. Stubbornly high levels of labor under-utilization in some industrialized countries suggest that the level of economic expansion will need to be in excess of 10 to 15 percent of real GDP growth per year in order to ameliorate existing labor surpluses and to continually absorb the technologically unemployed.

Job guarantee proponents recognize this as a potential drawback to greater throughput. Cowling et al. (2003: 12) write, “while higher levels of output are required to increase employment, the composition of output is a pivotal policy issue.” To soften the social and ecological impact of this greater throughput, job guarantee advocates claim that make-work jobs could be environmentally sustainable, add value to the community, and promote upward mobility for current and future workers. Yet, if the private sector jobs they are temporarily replacing do not already possess such virtues, it is difficult to see how they will be imbued with these characteristics when they are performed in the public sector without re-defining the boundaries of work activities. Since the intention of the buffer stock is to temporarily employ workers and keep them trained for later private sector expansion, finding new tasks for them represents a permanent expansion of the functions of paid work. It is likely, however, that such job tasks will have to be permanently provided by the public sector as the private sector has little motivation to provide such socially beneficial functions.  Nels Anderson acknowledged the tendency for public employment to become permanent in his 1938 book The Right to Work. Anderson (1938: 65) links chronic unemployment to technological advance, “Technological advances in factory and office are constantly disemploying large numbers of workers, and despite assurances from American business that new industries will spring up, creating new occupations and new jobs, the truth is that such few new industries as there are do not want the unemployed from the relief rolls.” If they are intent on maintaining full employment through job guarantees, governments will need to be prepared to permanently retain the bulk of unemployed workers on public work projects.

A permanent expansion of public sector employment could certainly be used to reverse the Galbraithian social imbalance of private opulence in the face of public squalor, but if it goes beyond the provision of public goods and the amelioration of market failure it will itself be contributing to the growth of the private sector and the need for more public expenditure. If the provision of public goods is a persistent and growing need—the refitting of “clean technology,” for instance—then an appropriate response would be a permanent expansion of public sector hiring, not a buffer stock of temporary workers, who may disappear again when private sector hiring resumes. Thus, any full-employment program that entails an expansion of economic output works at cross purposes as it simultaneously causes social and ecological externalities that diminish well-being.

By contrast, work time regulation has the potential to reverse the Galbraithian social imbalance by reducing the scale of the private sector while expanding activities in the third sector. A redistribution of work time would afford the over-employed the time needed to partake more fully in the third sector, while the greater income received by the under-employed could help to increase their social involvement as well. Since work time reduction is a form of productivity dividend that does not necessitate more consumption and production in the private sphere, it would not exacerbate the social imbalance between public and private sector activities.

The difficulty surrounding the temporary nature of the buffer stock, has led some advocates to propose a bifurcated program with a “stable core buffer stock component and a flexible buffer stock” (Mitchell and Wray 2005: 240). As addressed below, wages of buffer-stock workers cannot be very attractive since low wages in the buffer stock serve to restrain the wage demands of primary sector workers. That is, primary sector workers will not demand higher wages if there is still some risk of having to accept a relatively lower buffer-stock wage. Effectively, a buffer stock model commits the government to achieving price stability by perpetuating the insider–outsider labor market segmentation that currently frustrates improved labor market outcomes. Assuming all buffer stock workers earn comparable wages, the stable core then becomes a permanent expansion of public sector employment at reduced wages. The risk of establishing and sustaining low-skilled, low-wage jobs has led Sawyer (2003: 888) to refer to the buffer stock plan as “underemployment or unemployment by another name.” Permanent public sector employment at low wages might be preferable to chronic unemployment, but is clearly inferior to a redistribution of work time that results in an expansion of private sector payrolls at prevailing wages.