It feels like there's a big disconnect in the arguments for and against a jobs guarantee.

The argument against is easy to understand, in that it's "workfare"; if we want to support jobless people and have the money to do it we should just give them money.

The argument for is usually not, however, that people "need" to work, or that giving people money for nothing is wrong somehow.

The argument at base is that capitalists should not have the power to decide who gets the money needed to live in society. The point of a jobs guarantee isn't even so much the wage given to those without, but the guarantee. You have a job with the government. It doesn't matter if you're employed somewhere else. It doesn't matter if you don't show up for three years straight. You have a job with the government. You can go do work and get paid for it, and you can't lose that right. It's important of course that there be democratic control, some sort of self- or community-determination of what the jobs are, arts grants as a "government job," sabbaticals, whatever else sounds good... but the most important part is still the guarantee.

A federal "jobs guarantee" where the government serves as a temp agency to supply employees to capitalists would be awful and something I'd hope every socialist would fight against, but even just guaranteed federal wages for volunteer work would be an improvement on the status quo. And if everyone can do that, and isn't reliant on a capitalist to give them a paycheck; and if nobody is unemployed, that puts incredible pressure on private sector employers. At the very least they wouldn't as easily be able to fire everyone who even thinks about unionizing, because they wouldn't be able to recruit replacements from the army of the unemployed.

If the demand for a guaranteed job gets too large, and all the volunteer work positions are filled, you could open it up to, say, non-profit worker co-ops. Then tie it into right-of-first-refusal labor law; if a company goes bankrupt the government loans/gives the workers the money to buy out the physical capital and run the business as a co-op, at which point they'd also be eligible to recruit new workers from the jobs guarantee program.

And after a few years of that... :tito-laugh:

But it really feels like the advocates are either afraid of laying out the socialist case or really do just hate the idea of giving people money for nothing. I heard Pavlina Tcherneva advocate for a jobs guarantee on the Current Affairs podcast and she had a big thing about destroying the reserve army of labor (in those words!)... but then she just stopped the argument at "nobody should be unemployed," as if that in itself was the entire point and there was no reason for her to half-quote Marx at all.