The Demand

We are often told that people are unemployed in America because they lack the will to work, or don’t possess the industriousness to find or create a job. The truth is that unemployment is not the result of a lack of personal responsibility, but is instead a creation of the federal government. While it is completely within the power of our federal government to eliminate involuntary unemployment in America, it instead actively enforces a regime of mass unemployment, through periodic interest rate hikes, which ensures that millions of Americans remain unemployed, even during “good” economic times.

The Jobs for All Alliance seeks passage of federal job guarantee legislation that would eliminate involuntary unemployment through a federally funded jobs program that is administered at the state and local levels to attend to a broad range of public priorities; from infrastructure, to care work, to public arts, and beyond. Such a program would provide a job at a living wage with full benefits to everyone who wants one, thereby easing racial tensions stoked by our chronic scarcity of job opportunities. By putting a floor under wages, it would improve worker bargaining power, and therefore job quality and compensation across the pay scale. This would allow us to rebuild the American middle class, and establish economic security for all Americans, even as we ensure a strong economy in which business can flourish. The Job Guarantee enjoys the support of 78% of the public according to the most recent available polling, and dozens of members of Congress, as well as economists, and other academics have expressed support for the idea.

We believe that many of our most harmful social and economic issues are rooted in the way our nation structurally engineers mass unemployment, and that it is clear that our government has it within its capacity to give every member of our society, regardless of background, a meaningful stake in our economy and its prosperity. By abolishing involuntary unemployment in America with a job guarantee, we can ensure that even those at the bottom of the economic ladder are able to live decent lives, and show once and for all that there is room in our economy for everyone to flourish.