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The writer doesn't justify his insistence that a Job Guarantee "IS NOT ‘MAKE-WORK’". It seems to me that if the primary purpose of a job is to provide work, the

by mhaymo 12y ago

The writer doesn't justify his insistence that a Job Guarantee "IS NOT ‘MAKE-WORK’". It seems to me that if the primary purpose of a job is to provide work, then it is by definition make-work.

tomp 12y ago
S/he says that government jobs would be those that benefit the community. It's not hard to come up with examples of those kinds of jobs - care for the elderly, cheap & healthy kitchens (like kitchens for the homeless, but for everyone instead), more repair and maintenance of infrastructure or new infrastructure (e.g. before WW2, German's increased employment by building highways throughout the country), culture and art events, recycling, running non-for-profit stores (for many basic items, the margin of the store is much greater than production costs) ... IMO, that's much less make-work than advertising, sales and similar (basically, jobs that exist because your product is not good enough to sell itself).
- anon4 12y ago
  But who would want a human to do those things if a machine can do it better, faster and more efficiently?
  - vanderZwan 12y ago
    "Let the robots do the robotic work, let humans flourish creatively." - Matthew Taylor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDQosiH4VAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDQosiH4VAc
- vanderZwan 12y ago
  These are also all examples of where adding a layer of bureaucracy to get paid ruins it. From what my parents (both GPs) told me, in the Netherlands we used to have a lot of volunteers helping out family members who needed extra support, and who simply got a fixed amount of extra money per month, no hassle. This had the extra benefit that it let nurses and doctors focus on the more difficult problems that they specifically were trained for. Then the government decided things had to be more fair (we're talking early eighties), so people suddenly had to fill in forms defining exactly how many hours they spent on helping out family to get the amount of money they deserve. Or something like that. The point was that there was this new layer of bureaucratic administration. It was a disaster, and within a few years they rolled it back. By then however, a lot of volunteers had simply given up and stopped helping, and they did not come back. And in the last decade we made the same mistake all over again. What's especially important to note was that under the new rules, people on average would have been paid more for their help - the old compensation was not nearly enough to cover the time and costs of the volunteers. And yet we ended up with less volunteers. Almost all of the examples you mentioned are things people do for other reasons than the money; any monetary compensation should be more of a hassle-free symbolic gesture of appreciation, or it ruins the whole intrinsic motivation. People are irrational like that, and we need to respect that if we want to make this work.
- michaelt 12y ago
  I've done some voluntary work; sometimes one gets assigned to do work that could be automated at fairly trivial expense. For example, I've been asked to: * Fold letters, put them into envelopes, and manually address the envelopes. * Deliver centrally-printed documents to people a long way from the printer. * Manually sort paper files into alphabetical order. * Sharpen colouring pencils by hand. If "Job Guarantee" employees are effectively free labour, my fear is they'd end up being assigned to do jobs that would only cost a few hundred dollars to automate out of existence. It's my personal experience that doing such jobs manually is pretty unsatisfying (and economically inefficient to boot).
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  No, says the entrepreneur, having the government fix the roads stifles innovation and impedes the god-given right of some megacorp profiting.They should hire a company that in turn will hire the same people who would do the job, except with lower job security and cheaper wages. And people wonder why the public always gets the short end of the stick.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    There is a difference between, on the one hand, needing something done and hiring people to do it; and on the other needing to employ people and finding things for them to do.
seoguru 12y ago
As Randall Wray said: "There are lots of people who want to work but cannot find paying jobs. And lots of stuff that needs to be done. We’ve got a serendipitous problem here: bring the two together." He lists a number of ideas for jobs in this article: http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2014/01/07/bop-a-mole-2-jg-workers-will-do-nothing-useful-the-jg-program-will-not-be-manageable/ http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2014/01/07/bop-a-mole-2-j...
- sokoloff 12y ago
  I start out inherently skeptical that the government could run a work program better than private industry. That article dispels that concern and many others that I had about such a program. Thanks for sharing it!
  - jsmeaton 12y ago
    > These firms are under constant pressure to increase the workload, depress wages, and harden the working conditions of those workers as they engage in ruthless competition at the bottom of the wage pool. A JG program will not be run for profit; it will set the minimum wage and working conditions tolerated in the USA. We can choose to enforce humanitarian conditions and livable wages in the JG. I think this is a really important quote from the article. In such a rich society (USA, Australia, Canada, Britain, wherever..) it seems sort of unnecessary that we'd force wages to be so low they are barely above the poverty line. But I'm not entirely sure how this fits into a global economy. If workers in China are working for cents there is no way a similar industry in Australia can compete with a minimum wage of $18 an hour. We've seen this in textile manufacturing in particular. I'm also not sure what the views will be when we've magically automated nearly everything. Eventually there is not going to be enough work for everyone. Will we finally decide that "work" isn't necessary for everyone and allow time to be spent on travel, family, and fun? Or will we invent things to do for the sake of contributing? Just tossing out random thoughts I've had over the last few years.
    - sergiosgc 12y ago
      > But I'm not entirely sure how this fits into a global economy. If workers in China are working for cents there is no way a similar industry in Australia can compete with a minimum wage of $18 an hour. We've seen this in textile manufacturing in particular. This has been discussed to death here in Portugal. Portugal had, up until the 90s, a strong textile and shoe making industry. It moved to the east during the late nineties, early noughties. Strangely, the last five years have seen a renaissance. Our cost of labor, while cheap in EU terms is orders of magnitude above eastern countries. The explanation for the resurgence of the industry is twofold: a) Cost of labor accounts for less than one third of final product cost; b) Logistics advantages can easily recover the cost difference. Think short lead times, work force adaptability, higher automation, lower defect ratios, smaller inventory. Couple this with fashion sticking less and less to two collections per year (and going for high adaptability during the season), and you get a competitive advantage China and Vietnam do not have.
dllthomas 12y ago
I don't think they envision that being "the primary purpose" of the jobs being guaranteed. The notion is "find things of value that are not being compensated, employ people to do them". I am highly skeptical, however, that a government bureaucracy can consistently find such work in the face of a guarantee of employment. Yes, we can think of examples. But 1) many of those examples fade in the presence of a basic income (helping the poor is a for-profit activity when the "poor" can pay you to help them), 2) actually quantifying the number of opportunities these examples represent is nontrivial (it may have been done, but I haven't found it in this discussion), and 3) if these things genuinely provide value and we want them done then we can still pay people to do them without providing a job guarantee.

by mhaymo 12y ago

The writer doesn't justify his insistence that a Job Guarantee "IS NOT ‘MAKE-WORK’". It seems to me that if the primary purpose of a job is to provide work, then it is by definition make-work.

tomp 12y ago

S/he says that government jobs would be those that benefit the community. It's not hard to come up with examples of those kinds of jobs - care for the elderly, cheap & healthy kitchens (like kitchens for the homeless, but for everyone instead), more repair and maintenance of infrastructure or new infrastructure (e.g. before WW2, German's increased employment by building highways throughout the country), culture and art events, recycling, running non-for-profit stores (for many basic items, the margin of the store is much greater than production costs) ... IMO, that's much less make-work than advertising, sales and similar (basically, jobs that exist because your product is not good enough to sell itself).

anon4 12y ago
But who would want a human to do those things if a machine can do it better, faster and more efficiently?
- vanderZwan 12y ago
  "Let the robots do the robotic work, let humans flourish creatively." - Matthew Taylor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDQosiH4VAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDQosiH4VAc
vanderZwan 12y ago
These are also all examples of where adding a layer of bureaucracy to get paid ruins it. From what my parents (both GPs) told me, in the Netherlands we used to have a lot of volunteers helping out family members who needed extra support, and who simply got a fixed amount of extra money per month, no hassle. This had the extra benefit that it let nurses and doctors focus on the more difficult problems that they specifically were trained for. Then the government decided things had to be more fair (we're talking early eighties), so people suddenly had to fill in forms defining exactly how many hours they spent on helping out family to get the amount of money they deserve. Or something like that. The point was that there was this new layer of bureaucratic administration. It was a disaster, and within a few years they rolled it back. By then however, a lot of volunteers had simply given up and stopped helping, and they did not come back. And in the last decade we made the same mistake all over again. What's especially important to note was that under the new rules, people on average would have been paid more for their help - the old compensation was not nearly enough to cover the time and costs of the volunteers. And yet we ended up with less volunteers. Almost all of the examples you mentioned are things people do for other reasons than the money; any monetary compensation should be more of a hassle-free symbolic gesture of appreciation, or it ruins the whole intrinsic motivation. People are irrational like that, and we need to respect that if we want to make this work.
michaelt 12y ago
I've done some voluntary work; sometimes one gets assigned to do work that could be automated at fairly trivial expense. For example, I've been asked to: * Fold letters, put them into envelopes, and manually address the envelopes. * Deliver centrally-printed documents to people a long way from the printer. * Manually sort paper files into alphabetical order. * Sharpen colouring pencils by hand. If "Job Guarantee" employees are effectively free labour, my fear is they'd end up being assigned to do jobs that would only cost a few hundred dollars to automate out of existence. It's my personal experience that doing such jobs manually is pretty unsatisfying (and economically inefficient to boot).
JetSpiegel 12y ago
No, says the entrepreneur, having the government fix the roads stifles innovation and impedes the god-given right of some megacorp profiting.They should hire a company that in turn will hire the same people who would do the job, except with lower job security and cheaper wages. And people wonder why the public always gets the short end of the stick.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  There is a difference between, on the one hand, needing something done and hiring people to do it; and on the other needing to employ people and finding things for them to do.

seoguru 12y ago

As Randall Wray said: "There are lots of people who want to work but cannot find paying jobs. And lots of stuff that needs to be done. We’ve got a serendipitous problem here: bring the two together." He lists a number of ideas for jobs in this article: http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2014/01/07/bop-a-mole-2-jg-workers-will-do-nothing-useful-the-jg-program-will-not-be-manageable/ http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2014/01/07/bop-a-mole-2-j...

sokoloff 12y ago
I start out inherently skeptical that the government could run a work program better than private industry. That article dispels that concern and many others that I had about such a program. Thanks for sharing it!
- jsmeaton 12y ago
  > These firms are under constant pressure to increase the workload, depress wages, and harden the working conditions of those workers as they engage in ruthless competition at the bottom of the wage pool. A JG program will not be run for profit; it will set the minimum wage and working conditions tolerated in the USA. We can choose to enforce humanitarian conditions and livable wages in the JG. I think this is a really important quote from the article. In such a rich society (USA, Australia, Canada, Britain, wherever..) it seems sort of unnecessary that we'd force wages to be so low they are barely above the poverty line. But I'm not entirely sure how this fits into a global economy. If workers in China are working for cents there is no way a similar industry in Australia can compete with a minimum wage of $18 an hour. We've seen this in textile manufacturing in particular. I'm also not sure what the views will be when we've magically automated nearly everything. Eventually there is not going to be enough work for everyone. Will we finally decide that "work" isn't necessary for everyone and allow time to be spent on travel, family, and fun? Or will we invent things to do for the sake of contributing? Just tossing out random thoughts I've had over the last few years.
  - sergiosgc 12y ago
    > But I'm not entirely sure how this fits into a global economy. If workers in China are working for cents there is no way a similar industry in Australia can compete with a minimum wage of $18 an hour. We've seen this in textile manufacturing in particular. This has been discussed to death here in Portugal. Portugal had, up until the 90s, a strong textile and shoe making industry. It moved to the east during the late nineties, early noughties. Strangely, the last five years have seen a renaissance. Our cost of labor, while cheap in EU terms is orders of magnitude above eastern countries. The explanation for the resurgence of the industry is twofold: a) Cost of labor accounts for less than one third of final product cost; b) Logistics advantages can easily recover the cost difference. Think short lead times, work force adaptability, higher automation, lower defect ratios, smaller inventory. Couple this with fashion sticking less and less to two collections per year (and going for high adaptability during the season), and you get a competitive advantage China and Vietnam do not have.

dllthomas 12y ago

I don't think they envision that being "the primary purpose" of the jobs being guaranteed. The notion is "find things of value that are not being compensated, employ people to do them". I am highly skeptical, however, that a government bureaucracy can consistently find such work in the face of a guarantee of employment. Yes, we can think of examples. But 1) many of those examples fade in the presence of a basic income (helping the poor is a for-profit activity when the "poor" can pay you to help them), 2) actually quantifying the number of opportunities these examples represent is nontrivial (it may have been done, but I haven't found it in this discussion), and 3) if these things genuinely provide value and we want them done then we can still pay people to do them without providing a job guarantee.