jgp

Types of Jobs: A "National Care Act" 

One thousand women on horseback. These were the roving New Deal librarians who, starting in 1935, brought books and set up libraries in the most remote areas of Kentucky. The women rode across twenty-nine counties, sometimes over 100 miles a day. And where the terrain was difficult, they dismounted their horses and carried the books on foot. Their impact was far-reaching. As one recipient put it: "Them books you brought us has saved our lives." 3 The Works Progress Administration (WPA) library projects, which served forty-five states and employed 14,500 people, helped solve two problems at once –unemployment and illiteracy. These "unskilled" unemployed women provided a public library option to the most remote regions in the nation at a time when most libraries were primarily privately funded and most people had no access to books. They supported a public initiative for something we consider today to be a permanent fixture of social life –public libraries in every corner of the country. 

Today, our communities have entirely different needs and a much greater capacity for solving them. Horse-riding librarians are no longer needed, but there is a different kind of neglect communities suffer stemming from environmental factors and the underfunding of essential public services. Once we broaden our understanding of productive work, the sky is the limit for organizing projects. For example, programs to address the looming environmental challenges can create millions of public service jobs for years to come. And while there is endless invisible environmental work that can be done by people with different skills, there is also a lot of important care work that is undervalued, underpaid, and altogether ignored. Green jobs are defined here as those that address all forms of destitution and neglect of our most valuable resources, both natural and human. Thus the Job Guarantee is conceived as a national care plan that prioritizes care for the environment, care for the people, and care for the community. 

Care for the Environment

 In the 1930s, FDR's Tree Army planted 3 billion trees, created and rehabilitated 711 state parks, built 125,000 miles of truck trails, developed 800 new state parks, controlled soil erosion on 40 million acres of farm land, improved grazing conditions on public domain ranges, and increased the wildlife population. 4 These projects breathed a new life into the US conservation movement, the forerunner of today's climate activism. While unemployment and the Dust Bowl presented an existential threat to many rural communities during the Great Depression, the climate crisis today is of planetary proportions. Many of the most acute environmental problems occur precisely where people live –in urban and rural settings. The infrastructure is overwhelmed by water runoff, cities are threatened by forest fires, and residential communities are nesting beside hazardous waste sites. Cities are already thinking of urban tree planting as public health infrastructure that can keep air clean and cool, regulate temperatures, and support water quality and runoff. The environmental projects one could conceive of are endless –flood control, environmental surveys, species monitoring, tree planting, park maintenance and renewal, removal of invasive plants, building local fisheries. Projects can create community and rooftop gardens, strengthen fire and disaster prevention measures, weatherize homes, or launch composting and sustainable agriculture initiatives to address the food-desert problem in the US. 

Care for the Community

 Rebuilding the environment also means rebuilding communities. Jobs could include cleanup of vacant properties, reclaiming materials, restoration and other small infrastructure projects, setting up school gardens, urban farms, co-working spaces, solar arrays, tool libraries, and classes and programs, as well as building playgrounds, restoring historical sights, organizing community theaters, car-pooling programs, recycling, reuse and water collection initiatives, food waste programs, and oral histories projects. 

Care for the People 

The issues facing the people who live in those communities extend beyond the above-mentioned environmental challenges. Provision of elderly care, afterschool activities, meals-on-wheels, and special programs for children, at-risk youths, veterans, former inmates, and people with disabilities can all be part of the Job Guarantee program. Since the program provides job opportunities to the very people benefitting from these programs, it also gives them agency. For example, veterans or people with disabilities can help run the very outreach programs they count on for support. 

Other examples could include organizing nutrition surveys in schools, health awareness programs for young mothers, adult skills classes in schools and local libraries, or extended day programs, as well as shadowing teachers, coaches, hospice workers, and librarians. The Job Guarantee could also organize urban campuses, co-ops, classes and training, and apprenticeships in sustainable agriculture. 

All of the above-mentioned community care jobs could produce a new generation of urban teachers, artists and artisans, makers, and inventors. In fact, all of these tasks are already being done in one form or another. But all of them are in short supply, lacking enough helping hands and a budget to employ them. The Job Guarantee can fill this gap and scale up already existing best practices and projects. 

Real World Programs 

There is also much that can be learnt from direct employment programs around the world. These are often well targeted but temporary. A notable exception is India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which (although it is not universal) enshrines the right to employment into law, guaranteeing at least 100 days of paid work to each rural household per year. Examples of other large-scale programs past and present include the US New Deal, Argentina's Plan Jefes, South Africa's Expanded Public Works Program, and the Swedish corporatist postwar model, where the government effectively acted as an employer of last resort up until the late 1980s. 

During the 1930s, the New Deal pioneered large-scale public service employment when the unemployment rate in the US approached 30 percent. An estimated 13 million workers participated in the Works Progress Administration –the largest of the jobs programs, which can be credited with bringing the United States into the twentieth century. 5 It created jobs, set up a wide range of public service initiatives, and built the infrastructure that supported the war effort and the postwar