Randy Wray: The Job Guarantee and Real World Experience

Yves Smiths reposts Randy Wray's post about The Job Guarantee and Real World Experience in Argentinia.

To deal with the looming crisis and skyrocketing unemployment and poverty rates, the Argentinean government implemented a limited job guarantee program called Plan Jefes y Jefas de Hogar Desocupados (Program for the Unemployed Male and Female Heads of Households, or simply Jefes). Participation in the program grew quickly, to about 5% of the population, and about 13% of the labor force.

Italics in original

The program seems to be suffering from feminization in a macho society. The women wanted to participate in the program for the following reasons:

1. they felt (or would feel) useless sitting at home,
2. they felt like they were helping the community when they were working,
3. there is dignity in working,
4. they were meeting their neighbors and
5. they were learning new skills.

In other words, working allows people to become more human. Working allows people to become contributors to the societal good.

This type of program allows for community building through work. The people involved see themselves as building society.

Wray argues that:

The first great demand of a better social order…is the guarantee of the right, to every individual who is capable of it, to work—not the mere legal right, but a right which is enforceable so that the individual will always have the opportunity to engage in some form of useful activity and if the ordinary economic machinery breaks down through a crisis of some sort, then it is the duty of the state to come to the rescue and see that individuals have something to do that is worthwhile—not breaking stone in a stoneyard, or something else to get a soup ticket with, but some kind of productive work which a self-respecting person may engage in with interest and with more than mere pecuniary profit.

Emphasis Mine

This is a direct challenge to the use of unemployment as a bludgeon to the workers to keep wages low in a Capitalist economy. The right to work challenges the Capitalist right to crush workers.

Wray concludes:

In a sense, the jobs guarantee/employer of the last resort program really is targeted “to the bottom” since it “hires off the bottom”, offering a job to those left behind. Its wage and benefit package is the lowest, setting the minimum standard that private employers can offer. It does not try to outbid the private sector for workers, but rather takes those who cannot find a job. Further, by decentralizing the program, it allows the local communities to create the projects and organize the program. The local community probably has a better idea of the community’s needs, both in terms of jobs and in terms of projects. However, actual project formulation must be done on a case-by-case basis.

Emphasis Mine

Sounds like Socialism to me. To have communities decide on the tasks to be undertaken is a good first step towards to having popular democracy direct investment and economic activity.