The Misguided Altruism of the Federal Job Guarantee
The idea of a Federal Job Guarantee comes from a place of compassion for the beleaguered working class. Champions of the policy like Bernie Sanders, a frontrunner for the Democratic Nomination for President, push the idea in the hopes of providing the millions of unemployed Americans with a renewed sense of purpose, dignity, and cash flow that has been stripped from them since the recession of 2008, as swaths of the working class have found themselves left behind by soaring GDP and corporate profits.
However, this well-meaning policy holds multiple assumptions stemming from the outdated culture of protestant work ethic and capitalism’s translation and confluence of human value and economic value. These institutional beliefs are so pervasive in our politics and discourse surrounding our economy, that even the most progressive among us are susceptible to their gravitational pull.
The ideas that undergird the Federal Job Guarantee and other notions of employment-as-identity ideology are, at its core, defining humans by their ability to contribute to an economy. This is actually a place in which capitalism and socialism come to agree, albeit in different ways — capitalism defining life as a tool in the symphony of competition and consumption, while socialism looks at each person as an instrument whose best place is the position contributing most efficiently to the state. They are both exorbitantly wrong, both morally and (depending on one’s goals) economically.
Our lives and our welfare shouldn’t be measured by our ability to punch a clock. I don’t believe the man or woman working 60 hour weeks at a call center, tethered to their squeaking, flimsy computer chair by their biweekly paycheck, which allows them and their family to narrowly avoid death and continue paying their Netflix subscriptions on time, is an efficient use of the human condition.
Instead, people should not be made to feel shame over the ascending feeling deep in their bones that they don’t want to spend their lives stuck in the typical trade-off with an employer: Give your life to your job, and in return the job will allow you to keep living.
As full time jobs disappear due to automation, the increasingly freelance-oriented economy and globalization, the answer is not to artificially raise the supply of jobs, increasing the already omnipresent notion that to work is to live, and, as a result, bringing the stigmatization of those who choose not to design their life around employment to an utterly deafening pitch.
