Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo
A federal job guarantee could provide good living-wage jobs to anyone who wants them.
The powder keg of COVID, police brutality, and mass unemployment has exploded and exposed the neatly woven economic disparities sewed into many aspects of American life—health care, jobs, banking, incarceration, education, housing. Inside this toxic mix lurks another engine of economic injustice—unemployment. This is a perennial feature of the economy, regularly discounted, justified, and explained away when the economy is growing, but hard to ignore now in the midst of this pandemic.
And when I say “pandemic,” I don’t mean COVID-19. I mean mass unemployment—a looming crisis of our own making.
Unlike some countries, which used government budgets to cover the wage bill of workers threatened with COVID-related layoffs, in the U.S. we surrendered to the inevitability of mass unemployment. This was a colossal mistake. The CARES Act budget was more than enough to pay every single wage in the U.S. for three months. Germany, which protected payrolls, saw a jump in unemployment from 5 percent in March to only 5.9 percent in April. By contrast, the U.S. unemployment rate soared from 4.4 percent to 14.7 percent during the same period. In May, unemployment edged down from 14.7 percent to 13.3 percent, emboldening Republicans to reject another round of additional unemployment benefits. This is akin to pulling the life preserver away from a drowning person, just because they drifted a bit closer to the shore.
As we have failed to adequately tackle one epidemic (a second COVID wave is well under way), we seem woefully unprepared to tackle the other—the epidemic of unemployment.
Unemployment has all the features of an epidemic, and it propagates like one. Mass layoffs are the infectious agent.
This is not hyperbole. Unemployment has all the features of an epidemic, and it propagates like one. Mass layoffs are the infectious agent. They spread from storefront to storefront, from family to family, and from community to community. When people lose their jobs, they curtail their spending, reducing business sales. Firms respond with additional layoffs, depriving other workers of their income. Unemployment spreads like a virus, as one unemployed person unintentionally throws another out of work.
Unemployment is not a color-blind epidemic either. The labor market is a powerful engine of reproducing racial and gender inequality. African American men and women traditionally suffer much higher unemployment rates than white Americans. Black youth are stuck in permanent depression-level joblessness. In May 2020, for example, while the unemployment rate edged down for whites (from 13.8 percent to 12.1 percent), it ticked up for black Americans (from 16.7 percent to 16.8 percent).
The wholesale incarceration of African American men has been detrimental to their job prospects. A recent study estimates that in 2014, for example, nearly 30 percent of black men in their prime working years did not earn a single dollar of income. The disparities and pathologies in the labor market are staggering. The very same people whom we celebrate as essential workers are dying at higher rates and suffering higher levels of unemployment.
Like an epidemic, unemployment is also virulent. It leaves lasting impacts on communities and people, especially on the most vulnerable among us—those who are last hired but first to be fired, who suffer the most precarious work conditions, irregular hours, low pay and benefits, and who have little or no savings and carry high levels of debt (again, typically women and people of color). Long-term unemployed workers suffer permanently lower incomes throughout their working lives, and unemployment can remain permanently higher. There is even a phrase for this in economics that sounds like a virus: hysteresis, which refers to how the effects of unemployment endure even after the initial shock.
Unemployment is also deadly—it increases mortality rates, suicides, and sickness. Unemployed individuals and their families suffer higher rates of physical and mental illness, make more trips to the doctor, and spend more on medication. Their children suffer malnutrition, and face poor educational and job prospects. Unemployment causes community blight, stretches public resources, and reduces local tax revenue. Like a disease, unemployment does not just affect the unemployed individuals, but also those around them.
A Cure for Unemployment
The rush to reopen the economy predictably undermined our efforts to tackle the virus. The U.S. is on course to sacrifice many more lives for fear of losing more jobs. But while we have no vaccine for COVID yet, we know well how to inoculate against unemployment.
The fastest and least painful way to tackle the unemployment crisis is for the government to employ the unemployed, directly, safely, and with all necessary protections and precautions that social distancing requires. FDR provided a basic blueprint: publicly funded infrastructure projects, conservation initiatives, and jobs for artists and musicians. There is no shortage of things that we can and need to do. Creating jobs programs to address this crisis is necessary but still inadequate. Temporary projects expire as soon as the public perceives that the unemployment problem is not “bad enough,” leaving millions out of work still.
COVID may have been unintended, but mass unemployment was planned.
The only way to tackle the scourge of unemployment once and for all is through a federal job guarantee—a program that provides good living-wage jobs on demand to anyone who wants them, whatever their circumstance and personal situation, no matter if the economy is reeling from a deep crisis or humming near full employment. Without a program that employs those who have difficulty finding work, we ensure that the economic injustices and the silent epidemic that unemployment inflicts on people and communities will stay with us.
In the midst of long-standing racial and economic inequality, we now face two additional calamities—those of public health and mass unemployment. We responded to the first calamity by creating the second. COVID may have been unintended, but mass unemployment was planned. While scientists scramble to find effective treatments for COVID, we know how to protect existing jobs and create good employment opportunities for the unemployed, whoever and wherever they may be. It is time for a permanent federal job guarantee.
