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National
Jobs
for All Network
_______________________________________________________________________
P.O.
Box 96, Lynbrook, NY
11563 · nj...@njfac.org ·
www.njfac.org
April
2020
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Economic
Justice, Jobs for All,
and the Coronavirus
Pandemic
Dear Friends and Partners in the
Advocacy of Jobs for All,
We write to you at this time of
national crisis--with compassion
and hope for your safety and the
future of our country.
This dreadful Pandemic is
plaguing a nation already
suffering from persistent,
deeply divisive, and destructive
economic inequality—a nation
thus particularly poorly
prepared to deal with this
crisis. The public health and
consequent economic crises that
are plaguing us highlight the
chronic problems that beset
millions of Americans,
especially the poor and racial
and ethnic minorities.
In the Spirit of the New
Deal—which mounted measures of
Relief, Recovery, and Reform in
response to a Great Depression
that led to near economic and
political collapse—we offer the
following Proposals
for Relief, Recovery, and
Reform to Combat the
Coronavirus Crisis
and to achieve a more just and
equitable society.
Following our Proposals
for Relief, Recovery, and
Reform is the
problem analysis on which these
Proposals are based—in a section
entitled, Two Kinds
of Crises: Two Kinds of
Challenges. We
believe this crisis can and will
give rise to social mobilization
and social change.
We welcome your responses to our
proposals for changes in public
policy; your suggestions for
expanding or altering them; your
thoughts about the analysis of
present and ongoing challenges
on which we base these changes;
and your ideas about the
essential mobilization and
social movement building on
which Relief, Recovery, and
Reform depend.
In Solidarity, and with Fervent
Hopes for a Better Future,
Trudy Goldberg, Chair
Chuck Bell, Vice Chair
Philip Harvey, Counsel
National Jobs for All Network
(NJFAN)
P.S. We thank the following
other Executive Committee
Members who also contributed to
this work: Sheila Collins, Logan
Martinez, Frank Stricker, and
June Zaccone.
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Proposals
for Relief, Recovery and
Reform
-
The
public health and
consequent economic
crisis that is plaguing
the entire U.S.
population highlights
the chronic economic,
social, and physical
insecurity that besets
millions of Americans,
even in the best of
times.
-
In
the spirit of the New
Deal, which mounted
measures of relief,
recovery, and reform in
response to the Great
Depression, we propose
the following changes
which, like those
accomplished during the
crisis of the 1930s,
require mass
mobilization and
organization of powerful
social movements.
RELIEF AND RECOVERY
FROM THE PANDEMIC:
- Federal
Government provision of
whatever additional
benefits individuals and
families need to assure
their economic and social
security for the duration
of the crisis — for food,
shelter, health care….
Suspension of collections
of rent, mortgage
payments, medical debt,
and consumer debt for four
months and a suspension of
student loan payments.
- Federal
Government leadership and
assumption of
responsibility for:
universal testing for the
Coronavirus; strategic
distribution of needed
equipment and materials to
prevent the spread of the
virus, and assure prompt
and effective treatment
for those who contract the
disease; provision of
ample protective gear for
health care and other
vital workers; and
reliable advice to
individuals and groups as
to when it is safe for
them to begin to resume
normal activities, and
return to work.
- Adequate
pay, benefits, and
protection for all
front-line workers,
regardless of immigration
status, plus additional
compensation and benefits
or their service and death
benefits for the
front-line workers who
succumb to COVID-19.
- Direct
Government Job Creation as
the primary means of
meeting the needs of those
who lack work after
it is safe for them to
return to work.
PERMANENT REFORMS TO
MEET HUMAN NEEDS
A large range of unmet
human needs are especially
highlighted by the current
emergency, but they are also
omnipresent for millions of
Americans in "normal" times.
These include:
- Affordable
Health Care for All, and
a national plan for the
American public health
system that includes
greater coordination
among its units, and
adequate planning for
future public health
crises.
- Paid
Sick Leave for all
workers.
- Unemployment
Benefits for all
unemployed people, and,
in periods of widespread
unemployment, an
employee retention
strategy that would
avoid mass layoffs by
compensating employers
for keeping workers on
their payroll, even when
there is no work for
them to do—a better means of providing
unemployment
compensation benefits
during a crisis.
- Affordable
Housing for All.
- Tuition-Free
Public Higher Public
Education, and
Cancellation of all
Student Debt.
- High
Quality, Affordable
Child Care and Long-Term
Care for All.
- Universal
Broadband Access.
- Guarantee
of Living-Wage
Employment for everyone
who wants to work with
emphasis on jobs that
green the environment,
repair the
infrastructure, and
provide vital human
services: A Green New
Deal Featuring both a
Job Guarantee and
Planet-Saving
Sustainability Policies.
- Strengthening Collective
Bargaining Rights.
- Adequate
Income Support for
everyone who cannot or
is not expected to work.
- Strengthened
Social Security and a
well-funded Retirement
System that covers the
entire workforce.
- A
National Voting System
that assures the right
to vote for all American
citizens qualified to
vote.
We
Stand Ready To Work With
Individuals And Other
Organizations In Building
The Social Movements On
Which These Changes
Depend. Join Us!!
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Two
Kinds of Crises: Two Kinds
of Challenges
The
Coronavirus Pandemic —
mass contagion and
deadly illness
compounded by economic
freefall — is an even
greater challenge to
public policy than an
economically-induced
crisis like the recent
Great Recession.
Both crises require
extended and greatly
expanded coverage of
income support
programs like
Unemployment Insurance
as well as government
provision of the other
essential goods and
services that should,
in a just society, be
available to all—not
solely doled out or
extended in
emergencies.
Nurses
preparing to transport ill
patients during the
1917-18 flu pandemic
(Library of Congress)
In an
Economically-Induced Recession,
government compensation for lost
work and income helps to
maintain consumption, restore
jobs, and keep unemployment from
mushrooming from recession into
depression. Such intervention by
the Federal government prevented
the Great Recession of 2007-2008
from becoming a Great Depression
like the one that occurred with
minimal Federal intervention in
the aftermath of the 1929 Stock
Market Crash. Yet, even with
rapid intervention, including a
huge bailout of the economy’s
financial sector and a
multi-billion-dollar stimulus,
it took nearly a decade after
this first 21st
Century meltdown for the
unemployment rate to reach its
pre-recession level of 4.7
percent. And even then,
millions of workers — two-and-a
half times the official
unemployment rate — were either
jobless or forced to work
part-time, not to mention
millions more who toiled
full-time, year-round but
remained poor. This denial of
the opportunity to earn a
living-wage for millions of
Americans points to the need for
a Guarantee of
Living-wage Work.
A Pandemic-Induced
Recession is both a
public health challenge and a
much greater economic challenge
than an economically-induced
recession — a loss of jobs due
to lack of aggregate demand but
also a loss of workers, many too
sick to work, others advised to
self-isolate or simply fearing
contagion. Consequently, there
is a need for more stimulus
spending and more generous and
extensive government benefits.
Already, the COVID-19 relief is
in the trillions, and more is
contemplated--even by an
Administration that only
recently tightened access to
essential goods and services to
poor and working-class
individuals and families. The
Pandemic, with its critical need
for medical care and the
possibility that affected
individuals would endanger
themselves and others by
foregoing unaffordable
treatment, underscores the need
as well as the obligation to
provide free care for all those
afflicted by the virus.
The COVID-19 Pandemic also
underscores the need for permanent
reform: the assurance of
health care for all as a human
right. Never again
should any of our people have to
suffer both illness and the
added pain of inability to pay
for treatment. Nor should the
lack of Paid Sick Leave
endanger both workers and the
population at large.
Pandemics are a mix of mass
unemployment and dangerous, even
deadly employment. The need for
health care mushrooms, and
caring for the ill and dying
becomes even more demanding,
stressful, and risky to the
health of care-givers than in
ordinary times. Some health-care
workers are highly skilled and
well-paid, but others are poorly
compensated for life-threatening
labor. That those who care for
the sick and dying should have
to bear these burdens without
sufficient equipment and
adequate protection is a
national disgrace—one that
should never be repeated.
Surviving the crisis is
impossible without other vital
workers: cashiers and shelf
stockers in grocery stores and
mail-order warehouses,
pharmaceutical personnel,
building custodians,
transportation workers, and many
more. A shockingly large number
of these vital, endangered
workers earn poverty wages, an
injustice that highlights the
inadequacy of U.S. labor law and
the need, among other reforms,
for a decent minimum wage--a
fight for more than $15!
Working at home: an
unequal opportunity.
Technology makes it possible for
some people to work in the
safety of their homes during
this Pandemic. However, just 16%
of Latinx workers and 20 percent
of Black workers are able to
work at home, compared with 30
percent of white workers. Both
the racial-ethnic disparity and
the fact that a minority of all
workers are unable to take
advantage of this option
underscores the need
for universal broadband access
and the availability in
every home of the
equipment needed to take
advantage of that access.
This is needed not just to
permit more people to work
remotely, but also to facilitate
socialization, the participation
of students in remote learning,
and access to entertainment for
all ages while self-isolating.
The
Need for Jobs When People
Are Able to Return to Work
Imagine
a world:*
- Where
everyone who wants to
work has a living-wage
job.
- Where
no one needs to cobble
together multiple jobs
just to make ends meet
- Where
joblessness and its
deeply debilitating
consequences no longer
exist.
- Where
millions work in concert
to heal our environment,
rebuild our physical and
care infrastructure
*IMPORTANT
NOTE: This picture and
above five lines are from
the Job
Guarantee Pledge.
See jobguaranteenow.org
Please sign the Pledge if
you haven’t done so
already!!
A nation with living-wage jobs
for all would be better able to
withstand a pandemic and
certainly better equipped to
recover from one. It would be a
nation with millions fewer
unemployed, millions fewer
working poor, millions fewer
with little or no dollars to
tide them over, millions fewer
ill-housed or homeless, millions
fewer dispirited and
impoverished by joblessness and
limited future prospects, and
millions fewer burdened by debt.
The centerpiece of current
proposals for guaranteeing work
to unemployed and underemployed
individuals is an updated, 21st
Century Model of the direct
job-creation programs that
provided useful work for
millions of unemployed workers
during the Great Depression. The
best known of these programs
were the Civilian Conservation
Corps (CCC) and Works Progress
Administration (WPA), and Job
Guarantee legislation based on
this strategy is currently
pending in Congress. See H.R.
1000. These and
other New Deal work programs not
only employed the jobless and
destitute but greatly enhanced
the country’s cultural,
environmental, and physical
resources--literally changing
the face of the nation.
A Job Guarantee (JG)
during a public health crisis
could provide badly needed
services while providing
income security for
individuals who might not be
eligible for adequate levels
of cash assistance. During
an ordinary recession, when
workers are able to work but
employers don’t need their
services, a job guarantee
program would allow society to
replace the lost earnings of
unemployed workers without
losing the benefit of their
services and without allowing
their skills to erode through
idleness. As the New Deal
demonstrated, this strategy
allows society to enrich itself
with additional public goods and
services, notwithstanding the
decline in private-sector
production.
A recession caused by fear of
contagion and/or public health
measures ordered to prevent the
contagion from spreading is
different. Because of
spontaneous isolation or
directives to do so, most
workers are rendered unavailable
for work, unless they can do so
remotely from home or are
providing an “essential
service.” Under these
circumstance individuals
employed by a job guarantee
program would be similarly
constrained from reporting for
work. The sponsors of job
creation projects would have
more latitude than private
businesses to undertake safe
community service work, but
those opportunities are not
unlimited. Accordingly, some
form of support other than a job
guarantee must be provided for
large numbers of workers.
The traditional way of doing
this is for the government to
provide unemployment
compensation and other public
benefits to partially or fully
replace lost wage income.
However, there is another
strategy. A number of European
countries are currently relying
on job retention schemes rather
than unemployment compensation
to protect both worker income
and the viability of business
enterprises during the COVID-19
pandemic. In effect, governments
are using funds that otherwise
would be spent on unemployment
compensation to subsidize the
cost of keeping currently
unneeded workers on payroll—even
if there is no work for them to
do.
The superiority of this method
of providing income assistance
to workers who are effectively
unable to work is reflected in
their unbroken receipt of wage
income, reduced levels of
economic stress, less strain on
the government’s social welfare
bureaucracy, and the greater
ease with which businesses can
restart their operations as
people are able to return to
work. With a secure funding
source, a job guarantee program
could adopt this strategy even
if the government relied on its
unemployment compensation system
to deliver wage replacement
benefits to other unemployed
workers during a public health
crisis.
A Job Guarantee would
provide a powerful remedy for
a post-pandemic recession.
Even with an aggressive worker
retention scheme, some workers
will still be laid off during a
public health crisis because
some businesses will fail
notwithstanding government
assistance. Those workers will
have to rely on unemployment
compensation benefits through
the balance of the public health
crisis along with workers who
were unemployed when the crisis
began.
A recession triggered by a
public health crisis is also
likely to persist after people
are able to begin returning to
work—unless the public health
crisis is very short. That’s
when the need for a job
guarantee program would reassert
itself. Governments are likely
to reduce the size and/or limit
the duration of unemployment
insurance benefits at that
point; and even if they do not,
unemployed workers and society
would be better served by
providing useful, decently paid
work for those workers who
otherwise would remain idle. In
other words, as people are able
to return to work, any who lack
a job to return to will be best
served by a job guarantee
program. It would preserve their
income, boost their morale, and
allow them to retain their
skills while providing society
with public goods and services
that otherwise would not be
produced.
Using a direct job creation
program to deliver a fiscal
stimulus to an economy in
recession is also likely to be
more effective in combatting the
recession. It would create more
jobs per dollar of stimulus
spending. It would create them
faster. It would better target
its job creation effect on those
communities and population
groups that most need it; and it
would deliver its economic
stimulus more directly and
evenly to the consumer sector of
the economy whose recovery will
more reliably drive a recovery
in both business investment and
state and local government
spending.
A Job Guarantee Would
Advance Other Social Rights. President
Franklin Roosevelt’s landmark
proposal for a Second or
Economic Bill of Rights (1944)
began with a Job Guarantee: “The
right to a useful and
remunerative job in the
industries or shops or farms or
mines of the nation.” The other
rights in his proposed Second
Bill of Rights include adequate
wages and farm income, adequate
medical care, a good education,
a decent home, and security in
old age. A year later, in
repeating his call for Congress
to enact legislation realizing
these rights, FDR described the
right to an adequately paid job
as “the most fundamental” of
them all because it is the one
“on which the fulfillment of
the others in large degree
depends” (italics added).
A Job Guarantee and the
Right to Decent Housing. How
would a JG contribute to the
solution of the affordable
housing crisis? First,
if everyone who wanted to work
had access to living-wage
employment, the level of
subsidization needed to ensure
the availability of decent
housing for all households would
be reduced. Second, the jobs
provided by a job creation
program designed to secure the
right to work would provide the
resources needed to eliminate
the current shortage of decent,
affordable housing in the United
States. The same dual effect
would help secure other economic
rights.
A Job Guarantee would
also contribute to mitigation
of climate change and a
carbon-free economy. The
COVID-19 pandemic should be a
wakeup call to the need for us
to transform (not just reform)
our civilization’s relationship
to nature. We need to use the
lessons learned from the
pandemic to prepare for and try
to mitigate the slower-moving
but ultimately more threatening
climate change crisis. In fact,
the two crises are linked.
Humanity’s steady encroachment
on and degradation of the
habitat of wild animal
populations is a driver of both
climate change and the animal to
human transmission of diseases
to which humans lack immunity.
Our carbon-spewing economies
also contribute to the rise and
spread of disease by providing
an environment in which
vector-borne diseases are more
likely to thrive. As Dr. Arturo
Casadevall, a professor of
microbiology and immunology at
Johns Hopkins University
explains, when pathogens are
exposed to gradually warmer
temperatures in the natural
world, they become better
equipped to survive higher
temperatures in the human body,
and that diminishes the
effectiveness of one of our
body’s primary defense
mechanisms against
disease—fever.
A federal Job Guarantee program
could help counter the trends
that contribute to climate
change and the increased risks
of novel disease outbreaks in
several ways. First, it would
provide a large pool of
additional resources for the
fight against climate change.
Second, it would help solve the
problem of how to compensate
workers who lose jobs as a
result of the phase-out of
carbon-dependent technologies by
providing them guaranteed
reemployment in socially useful
jobs, with paid training to
whatever extent they may need
it, on projects that would help
rebuild the communities in which
they live. It would promote new
job creation that does not
degrade either human or
non-human animal habitats.
Finally, a job guarantee would
help neutralize the most
powerful deterrent to the
adoption of policies to combat
climate-change--a fear of job
loss.
This is why we believe that as
soon as workers are able to
safely begin returning to work
following the COVID-19 public
health crisis, the New Deal
direct government job creation
strategy should be deployed to
provide work for everyone who
wants it. |
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Get
Involved!!
1) SIGN
& PROMOTE THE JOB
GUARANTEE PLEDGE.
If you haven't already done
so, please Sign
the Pledge in Support of
Job Guarantee at
www.JobGuaranteeNow.org
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organization as a supporter,
and keep in touch with you
as proposals for a federal
Job Guarantee move forward.
Circulate the Pledge to
your colleagues and friends.
2) LEARN MORE:
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The National
Jobs for All Network is
dedicated to the
propositions that meaningful
employment is a precondition
for a fulfilling life, and
that every person capable of
working should have the
right to a job.
NJFAN relies on your
support. If you find our
material useful, please make
a tax-deductible donation.
We are all volunteers,
except for a part-time
coordinator.
National
Jobs for All Network
P.O. Box 96
Lynbrook, NY 11563
203-856-3877
Web: www.njfac.org
Email: nj...@njfac.org
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