Guaranteeing A Job With A Liveable Wage Is Better Than Guaranteeing A "Basic" Income

Ross Barkan, in The Guardian:

While every prior technological revolution created jobs to replace those that were phased out, the digital upheaval is only leaving more excess labor. The four tech giants which effectively control the American economy – Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon – employ relatively few people. Once thriving industries, from music to media to retail, are verging toward a form of extinction – existing, but only as spectral after-images of what they once were. When politicians typically nod toward this dire status quo, they talk nebulously about “retraining” workers for the jobs of the future, even if there really won’t be many jobs. There’s the hope that if only we teach enough kids to code, we will have a thriving economy on par with America’s golden years after the second world war. This, of course, is a fallacy...

[Here is a] proposal that animated Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and last saw life in the 1970s... The idea is simple. The government guarantees a job with livable wages and benefits to anyone who wants one. A national infrastructure bank could set a much-needed floor on wages and benefits. Imagine a Marshall plan for America. Spending to put people to work instead of sending them off to war...

[O]ne muscular vision: a bank to fund vital infrastructure projects and pay at least a national annual minimum wage of $24,600, with health benefits and opportunities to advance. This would go far beyond the universal basic income idea circulating in progressive and tech circles now. [Emphasis added: for my critique of libertechian Basic Income proposals see this piece.]

A jobs guarantee would likely boost wages in the private sector, where consolidation has killed competition and monopolies dominate the landscape. Competing with the government, the private sector would feel pressure to increase pay and benefits. In struggling cities and hollowed out towns, politicians hunt for answers. Local governments can only do so much. A robust federal jobs program would offer hope for the millions who want to work but can’t because the factory or the shopping mall or the local hardware store shuttered long ago. Working class and poorer people would have the dignity of a job, a place to go, people to see. A rising wage floor would mean the end of working poverty – people who have jobs but still can barely afford rent and food. If Democrats actually want to build a long-lasting majority and be the party that stands on the side of the vast number of people, a jobs guarantee offers a path forward...