What is a job guarantee—and how could it help us recover from the coronavirus?
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What if anytime someone wanted work, there was a societally beneficial job—like providing eldercare or planting trees—available to them?
In the middle of the Great Depression, at a point when around 20% of Americans were unemployed, the Works Progress Administration put millions of people back to work building roads, schools, bridges, and other infrastructure. The Civilian Conservation Corps, another agency started as part of the New Deal, hired a “tree army” that planted 3 billion trees. Now, as so many Americans have suddenly lost their jobs that the unemployment rate could surge to the same level, it raises a question: Should the government begin creating jobs like this again, to make sure anyone who wants to work has work to do?