You Shouldn’t Have to Work for Your Rights

Stop with the incrementalism already, Democrats.

It’s 2018 in America and both political parties seem content with tying basic rights to work. At least, that’s the message I received after Senators Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand threw their support behind a guaranteed jobs program.

Perhaps that’s too negative an interpretation of what is otherwise seen as an honest attempt at “creating floors for wages and benefits.” However, I wonder if Democrats missed a bigger opportunity to rethink the social contract. While the scale of a job guarantee would be massive, the ideas supporting it would be rather stale.

Specifically, it seems that progressives are again putting emphasis on access to rights instead of universal coverage. Rather than completely severing the connection between labor rights and work, progressives are inserting a public option into the labor market. They hope private employers will raise their labor standards in order to remain competitive, which seems fair enough.

However there’s little denying that the plan reinforces the idea that rights like healthcare can only be legitimately claimed through one’s labor. As a progressive manifesto claims:

We believe that everyone deserves a fair shot at a decent, fulfilling, and economically secure life.

Notice how progressives (the supposed anti-capitalists) don’t claim that everyone innately deserves the good life. Rather, people are only entitled to a “fair shot.” Should a citizen have to work for the government from nine-to-five in order to attain a “decent, fulfilling, and economically secure life?” I’m skeptical.

Here, the jobs-guarantee proponent will quibble about the necessity of work and the “dignity” it brings to everyone. But that sense of dignity is not a given—it is based upon social norms that have developed within a capitalist society. People find dignity in work today because, in large part, they are screwed without it. There’s just as many good reasons to suggest that freedom from work brings as much dignity to the individual.

Instead of demanding more effort from the working class, progressives should, as Elizabeth Bruenig states:

…focus more of our political energies on making sure that American workers have the dignity of rest, the freedom to enjoy their lives outside of labor and independence from the whims of their employers.

My boss, Nick Hanauer, and SEIU 775 President David Rolf address Bruenig’s concern when writing about a “Shared Security” system. Their proposed social contract would end our “traditional job-based benefit system.” As they explain:

One can think of the Shared Security Account as analogous to Social Security, but encompassing all of the employment benefits traditionally provided by a full-time salaried job. Shared Security benefits would be earned and accrued via automatic payroll deductions, regardless of the employment relationship, and, like Social Security, these benefits would be fully prorated, portable, and universal.

This policy is a far more revolutionary and exciting idea than a job guarantee. The latter is ameliorative, the former is transformational. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that a job guarantee is the best option and that we can afford and implement it across the country.

Doesn’t that policy still place an uncomfortable amount of responsibility on the working class? How is it their fault that they live on the brink of economic doom? Why aren’t Democrats repeatedly painting the very wealthy as malicious wage suppressors instead?

At least that portrayal of our economic order would be accurate. Three men own as much wealth as the bottom half of the nation’s population for goodness sake. How can the “party of the working class” look at today’s economic environment and think their best message is to offer more low-wage work?

It’s not like Americans are a lazy bunch, either. We already “work more hours per year than our English-speaking counterparts.” And the American worker’s situation in the labor market is so precarious that in 2016 “more than half of workers left vacation days unused.” Our productivity has increased, but our wages have not. Meanwhile, that wealth has been extracted from the many and redistributed into the hands of the few.

Most Americans don’t realize this. Just look how we think our wealth is shared:

And look what it actually is:

How can anyone look at that image and argue that the responsibility is on the bottom eighty percent to right this economic wrong? It’s absurd.

Yet that is exactly what Democrats are doing by promoting a guaranteed jobs plan. They are once again sparing the rich while forcing the masses to toil. It is incrementalism like this which has poisoned progressive politics and allowed for populist frauds like Trump to flourish.

So Democrats—stop blaming the victims of a rigged economy and start chastising the exploits of the rich.