How to guarantee jobs

1. The 4,000

Suddenly, job guarantees are all the rage.

4,000 scholars have written a letter saying a job guarantee:

would offer each person access to work that allows them to live with dignity. It would also provide a collective boost to meet the many pressing social and environmental challenges we currently face.

This seems to me like it could go two ways.

The governments which the scholars broadly agree are responsible for rampaging inequality and vicious managerialism could collectively decide that this is a very good idea the scholars have had and plan a big programme of really dignified, environmentally focused work providing for those whose lives have been laid waste by capitalism a new sense of ontological security, empowering them as true partners for a better, fairer world.

Or those same governments, driven by an urgent need to reinforce the status quo of power through discipline could say: “Thank you very much, progressive scholars. You have just given us permission to establish a workfare programme designed to squeeze the last drop of real dignity from the working class, because you failed to make any mention of a need to bolster security systems, in such a way as might allow workers to turn down shit jobs which they need three disease-ridden buses to get to. Now we get to impose even tighter cruelties on those who will not submit to the new disciplines of Workfare Plus, because you said it was ok to.”

I know which way I’m betting.

2. Dignity in choice

Fortunately, more grounded voices are at hand. James Meadway, a scholar economist whose name doesn’t appear in the 4,000, does make the connection:

[T]he power to determine the boundaries of work and not-work must be left to individuals, meaning (especially) control both over the nature and extent of surveillance and monitoring that takes place, but also the power of refusal of work in unsafe conditions.

James’ piece is one of those ‘must reads’ for anyone interested in this area (as is the Matt Bruenig piece he links to, which draws out the authoritarian downside of MMT technocracy that I was writing about eight years ago, namely:

the disturbing logic of some MMT advocates, that anyone unemployed at the time of the MMT release would be forced to work on the government payroll at the minimum wage created under it.

Eight years ago, we were in a very different kind of crisis. That crisis was man-made, and was to do with liquidity. By 2012, the problem to be resolved was, as Chris Dillow put it, that the capitalists had gone on strike. My policy prescription — a non-investment tax — was about breaking that strike.

As it turned out, the then Chancellor declined to take the advice of an obscure socialist blogger, and continued his policy of expansionary fiscal contraction, one of the outcomes of which is a state woefully unprepared for the current pandemic.

Now, as then, obscure socialist bloggers like me, and less obscure but also out-of-power bloggers like James, are in no position to deliver on proposals for a job guarantee backed by a choice and dignity-rendering basic income.

So we need to think laterally about how the left might exert the power it does have to try at least to mitigate the awfulness of the coming recession, whilst also developing evidence of what does create dignified,, socially useful work for when we are back in power.

3. The jobs we should guarantee

Let us then, move forward on the following basis.

First, jobs guaranteed should be as decent as possible in the circumstances. Second they should be as socially and environmentally useful as possible. Third, the design of the scheme should not have the negative unintended consequence of compulsion.

The kind of job that best fits that bill, in these circumstances, is the job you already have, but are at risk of losing because of a massive, virus-borne slump in demand. The challenge, from a position of opposition, is to ensure that these jobs are kept, improved where possible in terms of (interrelated) satisfaction and usefulness, and then added to.

Many of these jobs now at risk are in firms with underlying profitability once demand is up and running properly, but without the cash to weather the storm. I am thinking particularly of smaller retail, hospitality and leisure and the associated service and supply firms which are the lifeblood of town and suburban centres up and down the country, as well as tourist businesses in the relevant areas.

These are the kind of businesses who may have got the £10,000 or £25,000 grants but will not be in a position, for a variety of reasons but mostly an inability to forecast a quick enough to return to profit given the pandemic uncertainty, to access the loan scheme.

These are, for starters at least, the firms with the truly local, walk-to-work jobs, where pay not be great but work mates are, and where even the customers are ok. And they are the jobs that make town centres what they are.

4. Community wealth focused guarantees

I’ve been a bit mean in my assault on the 4,000. They don’t mention social security as a safeguard against authoritarian job guarantees, but they do say this:

Guaranteed employment would allow governments, working through local communities. to provide dignified work while contribution to the immense effort of fighting environmental collapse. (my emphasis)

I do not know what exactly is meant by ‘through local communities’ here, but in a British context it makes sense to start with local authorities as the most obvious local institution to get local job guarantee schemes off the ground.

Such schemes might look like this.

1. A local authority would either buy premises or but shares in local businesses, allowing them to continue trading through to a point of renewed profitability. Funds released from sale or invested via shares would fund salaries in the post Job Retention Scheme period.
2. The initial focus would be on town/suburb centre premises, with obvious variations e.g. tourist businesses. Light industry etc might come later.
3. Investments by local authorities would have a ‘buy back’ clause written into the legal agreement, allowing business owners to buy back share or property at a premium sufficient to cover the authorities’ sunk costs. Otherwise, beyond this break clause, local authorities would look to hamd over businesses to co-operatives/social enterprises set up with their assistance, with rental and purchase options open for premises.
4. Decision-making on soundness/desirability of investments, with a focus on social value delivered or potentially by delivered, will need initially need to be in the hands of local authorities, but as soon as practicably a key advisory committee/group should be formed from local Trades Councils and/or town centre associations, for whom a key objective should be the holistic growth of community wealth and well-being through good employment practices and other innovations e.g. cycle-friendly schemes, toilet schemes, and especially supply chain localization (with firms supported to be both suppliers and buyers).
5. While an initial focus may be on locally owned retailers, hospitality firms and and suppliers, there may also be scope to look at ‘defranchising’ some of the chain stores by facilitating/undertaking purchases of locally going concerns where conditions allow (see, for example, the news on Bella Italia).

5. Obstacles are opportunities

Now, as it stands, there’s a pretty obvious flaw in this plan. This is that local authorities, under the financial cosh for a decade now, are currently being battered into what the government hopes will be total submission. The government is in the process of reneging on its earlier “‘whatever it takes’ promises; and local government minister Robert Jenrick is actively seeking to lay the blame on councils for their dependence for their survival on income generating activities, in a cynical reverse of earlier Tory mantra.

Indeed, the government’s treatment of Transport for London, considered a local authority by bizarre virtue of a 2006 amendment to the Local Government Finance Act 1998 and therefore just a few hours away from a section 114 notice stopping all but minimum spending when it was bailed out under onerous, commuter-bashing conditions on Friday, shows what may well be awaiting many councils in a few weeks: bailouts under condition of massive cuts and systematic political humiliation.

In such circumstances, and within current legal constraints, it might be argued that local authorities may seem not best placed to carry forward the job guarantee initiatives I envisage. There are, though, two reasons to put forward in answer to such argument.

Second, when I have written so far of local authority, my terminology has been a little loose. Most local authorities now have some form or other of arms length company (I will not cover governance structure issues here) set up for the investment purposes I referred to above. It may be that these can come the primary vehicle for the ‘community wealth building’ proposed.

Furthermore, while they would not technically be local authority investments, but rather investment managed by local authorities, after the initial modelling it will be possible to attract local government pension funds to this new area of investment, on the basis of of underlying profitability and the premium buy back options, as well as the wider social well-being outcome arguments that are needed to ensure pension fund trustees can br assured they are abiding by their fiduciary duties to their future pensioners.

Second, developing a campaign around guaranteeing local jobs, in the context of a wider community wealth and well-being agenda, and focused on the specific outcome of getting the current section 114 (and associated) legislation (see here for technical detail on how this can be done legally), is precisely the kind of political campaign the left should be relishing in opposition.

Such a campaign brings the following benefits to the left.

It allows a shift of political battleground, to terrain where we have a greater chance of success, not least if t can be tied to the promises of the post-EU Shared Prosperity Fund, which has not yet seen the light of day, and the design/delivery should be the subject of robust negotiation from the trade unions.

It creates a focus on the ‘whole worker’ and allows us to develop a wider narrative about what it is to be secure, and help build a spirit of community conviviality (see section 6 of my recent essay on this concept).

It can build in conditions on active trade union representation and partnership working .

It stops a campaign for job guarantee falling into the bear trap of compulsion, identified by James (see above).

The building into the scheme of the buy back option, as well as making it a sounder commercial investment saves us from the immediate press assault that would go with a straight ‘expropriation’ model, but more importantly it retains owner/part owner expertise in delivering the business.

Once tested, it could be extended on much the same grounds to housing supply. That is, it allows a wider campaign for rent suspension (e.g. the London Renters Union model of resistance) on the basis that landlords (whose defenders say are also people with income needs etc) have a way out of their own difficulties through the sale and premium buy-back model.

If we get to anywhere near scale with this initiative, we start to establish the grounds for a natural experiment of sorts, where we test the hypothesis that organisations run for social purpose and with a level of social control actually perform as well as or better overall than those run for private return, but we do this through a consensual route via a programme into which whole communities buy. This experiment works at intra-town level, and across towns, assuming there are some local authority areas that refuse to become involve for what may become very ‘dated’ ideological reasons of the type now shared with Robert Jenrick.

6. Doing what we can from opposition

Now, of course this doesn’t go the whole hog. In particular it doesn’t do that much to launch a Green New Deal on a big scale, though local level initatives can be built in. That needs to happen separately, but be conceived off as quaity job adding, not guaranteeing.

In the end, we don’t get to go the whole hog because we lost the election. But I contend there’s more scope for progress here than via 4,000 scholars sending a slightly condescending letter which tells us that “we should not react with the same innocence as in 2008” in a weird conflation of those who govern and those who have been governed which reflects a well-meaning desire to change capitalism, but which is oddly divorced from any real analysis of power residing in it.