7 points in favor of universal basic jobs

worker bargaining power, countercyclicality, political economy, human capital, mobility, family formation, transition

A universal basic jobs program would supplement an economy otherwise consisting of market firms (whether capitalist or worker cooperatives.) Anybody who wished could sign up to be assigned work at a rate slightly below the market rate, but high enough to take care of family needs (the latter prevailing if it is higher.) Workers could quite these jobs freely, either to work in the market economy or to live off savings.

Many of the considerations here, but not all, are also points in favor of a fully planned economy with no unemployment. However, I’ll be assuming the supplementary version, both because it’s a more plausible proposal and because I’m broadly in favor of worker cooperatives as an element of socialist economy in the long run.

Briefly stated, these considerations are:

1. worker bargaining power

2. countercyclicality

3. avoiding human capital depreciation

4. political economy of redistribution and automation

5. geographic mobility and matching

6. family formation

7. transitioning to postscarcity

Even more briefly stated, almost all of these are downstream of how universal jobs offer the average person both more stability and more freedom. Less briefly stated, read below.

everyone can have a job, even pencil-driving mice

worker bargaining power

Freedom of contract gives both employers and employees leverage over one another, but a highly assymetrical one: severing the relationship may be a disaster for the worker but is usually closer to a hiccup for the employer.

If universal jobs are available, workers can much more credibly threaten to quit: they know they’ll be able to take care of their basic needs and maintain their self-identity as someone who contributes to society, and will be in a better position to bid up wages or to improve conditions.

This would arguably have the negative effect of lower discipline and hence lower productivity, hence making a prosperity-freedom tradeoff. However, the same effect can be found in tight labor markets, but is far from fatal; and technological progress is basically always improving productivity but has a much more ambiguous relationship with freedom, meaning that we should look for opportunities to convert it into freedom while we can.

countercyclicality

Like other forms of social assistance to the otherwise unemployed, universal jobs would act as an automatic stabilizer. That is, when the economy tanks and people are layed off, their income levels remain steadier than they otherwise would be, which prevents crashes from being self-propagating through consumer spending dips.

Holding not just consumer spending but also utilized labor relatively steady would also soften another form of self-cascading failure: since various industries are dependent upon one another, failure in one can lead to supply crises for others. Markets have self-correcting mechanisms that make this effect smaller than it otherwise would be, and we want unsustainable models cleared out eventually, so I don’t want to overemphasize this point, but I think it’s a real one.

avoiding human capital depreciation

Workers lose skills while unemployed, and since it’s harder to get a job with a big gap on your resume, this market disadvantage, like many, can be self-reinforcing. The skills that can be atrophied include everything from highly specific technical ones to managerial soft skills to very basic soft skills like getting up at a regular time, grooming to local socially acceptable standards (whether those standards are globally optimal or not), making small talk, and so on. I know that my own basic soft skills (apart from my circadian rhthym, which is naturally quite early) are quite weak by default and are maintained in practice only through constant practice.

This extends out from individual human capital to that embodied in networks. Parents being regularly employed allows them to model this for their children. And people build social networks of references and mentors through work, in addition to friends. References from a basic jobs manager or foreman might be less valuable in some ways (“oh, it’s just makework” would certainly be an attitude even in worlds where that was false) but also would have particularly valuable aspects insofar as some of the usual barriers of asking your boss to speak honestly about your strengths to a prospective employer would be lessened.

In addition to offering jobs doing what someone is already good at, jobs could be offered at what someone wants to do in the long-run (or even a split). This would allow for better long-run matching, better retooling to switch careers when life goals or the economy demands it, and generally greater ability to order one’s life as one sees fit.

political economy of redistribution and automation

Universal programs breed less redistributive resentment than means-tested ones; many people will have experience working in them for cyclical and “career shopping” reasons; and people working in basic jobs are, well, working. This doesn’t mean there will be zero resentment against them by those who are by disposition or interest on the right (a category that will always exist in relative terms, even if the central tendency moves way left) but this resentment should be less than for many other forms of redistribution, especially to the otherwise unemployed.

This also applies to the political economy of automation. As Carl Frey writes in The Technology Trap, innovations are often hampered by blocking coalitions of those threatened by obsolecence. With employment guarantees, this fear would be lessened; since technology is by far the most important factor in economic growth, this is probably the single most important factor at least in terms of prosperity rather than other values. Similar dynamics apply to the political economy of trade and of energy transitions.

geographic mobility and matching

Sometimes you want to move somewhere but don’t have a job lined up - to enable a spouse who needs to move for a job upgrade, or to move back home to care for an aging parent. This removes some of the matching issues here - a sort of geographic analog of the career testing elements discused above.

family formation

Many people, and especially educated people in developed countries, prefer to delay marriage and childrearing until they’re established in their careers. (I make no condemnation since, like almost all of my peers, it’s what I’ve done myself - although now that I have a family I wish I had started sooner.) Employment guarantees would facilitate earlier onset of family formation, insofar as family formation is delayed for reasons of job security - no doubt many prestige-focused individuals and couples would still devote their prime years to career.

Granted, if you’re a Malthusian or an antinatalist this is probably a bad thing; if you are instead worried about fertility decline, it’s a good thing. If you have no particular stance on this - if you recognize every fertility rate is either asymptotically heading towards 0 or carrying capacity and there have been oscillating moral panics between them since the start of modernity - it’s good to let couples decide to have kids relatively uncoerced from economic or other extrinsic considerations.

transitioning to postscarcity

Employment guarantees are certainly worse than UBI (or similar) in a world where we can do without much if any human labor - both society physically chugging along without any contribution and individuals finding meaning and social leverage without having a job to do.

If this is so, it would actually be fairly easy to do so on a sliding scale - simply reduce the number of hours required for full-time income from the basic job as productivity growth expands the economic slack. You could also have a dual system where one is expected to work x hours of whatever drudgery some prediction market or other bureaucratic process thinks you will be most productive doing, and y hours doing whatever you insist is most socially valuable, and slowly decreasing the former while increasing the latter, which would perhaps have a slightly different vibe for the same effect.