IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/blkpoe/v39y2012i1p121-136.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Historical Amnesia: The Humphrey-Hawkins Act, Full Employment and Employment as a Right

Author

Listed:
  • Helen Ginsburg

Abstract

Economist William A. Darity has proposed a federal job guarantee with decent wages for all job seekers, an idea with deep, but largely forgotten, roots in US history.The article briefly explores some New Deal job-creation efforts and President Franklin Roosevelt’s proposal for an Economic Bill of Rights. It then focuses on two major attempts to secure full employment through legislation. The Full Employment Bill of 1945 was defeated; the compromise, the Employment Act of 1946 did not have full employment as its goal. After years of struggle, a much-weakened Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978 passed, but then was violated and virtually ignored. Full employment shifts power from capital to labor, so major opposition can be expected from efforts to obtain it. Proponents need more power and a strong movement, including at the grassroots level, pushing for jobs for all--not just jobs for me or my group. Publicizing the benefits of past job programs and reintroducing the idea of a decent-paying job as a right are suggested, as well as making decent jobs for all the center of economic policy. This requires a fundamental break with neoliberalism and reallocating political power away from big business and Wall Street toward middle and working-class people and the working- and non-working poor. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2012

Suggested Citation

  • Helen Ginsburg, 2012. "Historical Amnesia: The Humphrey-Hawkins Act, Full Employment and Employment as a Right," The Review of Black Political Economy, Springer;National Economic Association, vol. 39(1), pages 121-136, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:blkpoe:v:39:y:2012:i:1:p:121-136
    DOI: 10.1007/s12114-011-9121-3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s12114-011-9121-3
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s12114-011-9121-3?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. William Darity, 2010. "A Direct Route to Full Employment," The Review of Black Political Economy, Springer;National Economic Association, vol. 37(3), pages 179-181, September.
    2. L. Randall Wray, 1998. "Understanding Modern Money," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 1668.
    3. Ron Baiman & Bill Barclay & Sidney Hollander & Haydar Kurban & Joseph Persky & Elce Redmond & Mel Rothenberg, 2012. "A Permanent Jobs Program for the U.S.: Economic Restructuring to Meet Human Needs," The Review of Black Political Economy, Springer;National Economic Association, vol. 39(1), pages 29-41, March.
    4. Mathew Forstater, 2002. "“Jobs for all”: Another dream of the rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr," Forum for Social Economics, Springer;The Association for Social Economics, vol. 31(2), pages 45-53, March.
    5. Mathew Forstater, 2002. "“Jobs for all”: Another dream of the rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr," Forum for Social Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 31(2), pages 45-53, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Aurélien Goutsmedt, 2022. "How the Phillips Curve Shaped Full Employment Policy in the 1970s: The Debates on the Humphrey-Hawkins Act," Post-Print hal-03878346, HAL.
    2. Adam Tooze, 2021. "Debating Central Bank Mandates," Working Papers 1, Forum New Economy.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Reynold F. Nesiba, 2013. "Do Institutionalists and post-Keynesians share a common approach to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)?," European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies: Intervention, Edward Elgar Publishing, vol. 10(1), pages 44-60.
    2. Ajit Zacharias, 2011. "The Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being, Great Britain, 1995 and 2005," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_668, Levy Economics Institute.
    3. John Henry, 2007. "“Bad” Decisions, Poverty, and Economic Theory: The Individualist and Social Perspectives in Light of “The American Myth”," Forum for Social Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(1), pages 17-27, January.
    4. Gertrude Goldberg, 2012. "Strategic and Political Challenges to Large-Scale Federal Job Creation," The Review of Black Political Economy, Springer;National Economic Association, vol. 39(1), pages 43-62, March.
    5. Michael Isaacson & Aleksandre Revia & Enrique Lopezlira & Jassmine Gaines, 2012. "Jobs and the Future of the US Economy: Possibilities and Limits," The Review of Black Political Economy, Springer;National Economic Association, vol. 39(1), pages 5-28, March.
    6. Josh Ryan-Collins, 2015. "Is Monetary Financing Inflationary? A Case Study of the Canadian Economy, 1935-75," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_848, Levy Economics Institute.
    7. L. Randall Wray, 2011. "Waiting for the Next Crash: The Minskyan Lessons We Failed to Learn," Economics Public Policy Brief Archive ppb_120, Levy Economics Institute.
    8. Brett Fiebiger & Scott Fullwiler & Stephanie Kelton & L. Randall Wray, 2012. "Modern Monetary Theory: A Debate," Working Papers wp279, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
    9. L. Randall Wray, 2013. "The Euro Crisis and the Job Guarantee: A Proposal for Ireland," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Michael J. Murray & Mathew Forstater (ed.), The Job Guarantee, chapter 7, pages 161-177, Palgrave Macmillan.
    10. Stephanie Bell, 1999. "Functional Finance: What, Why, and How?," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_287, Levy Economics Institute.
    11. L. Randall Wray, 2012. "Keynes after 75 Years: Rethinking Money as a Public Monopoly," Chapters, in: Thomas Cate (ed.), Keynes’s General Theory, chapter 15, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    12. Pavlina R. Tcherneva, 2012. "Beyond Full Employment: The Employer of Last Resort as an Institution for Change," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_732, Levy Economics Institute.
    13. Pavlina R. Tcherneva, 2008. "The Return of Fiscal Policy: Can the New Developments in the New Economic Consensus Be Reconciled with the Post-Keynesian View?," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_539, Levy Economics Institute.
    14. Phil Armstrong, 2020. "Can Heterodox Economics Make a Difference?," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 19964.
    15. William Darity, 2013. "From Here to Full Employment," The Review of Black Political Economy, Springer;National Economic Association, vol. 40(2), pages 115-120, June.
    16. Tanweer Akram & Syed Al-Helal Uddin, 2021. "An empirical analysis of long-term Brazilian interest rates," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(9), pages 1-20, September.
    17. Muriel Pucci & Bruno Tinel, 2010. "Réductions d'impôts et dette publique : un lien à ne pas occulter," Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 10085, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne.
    18. Yeva Nersisyan & Flavia Dantas, 2017. "Rethinking liquidity creation: Banks, shadow banks and the elasticity of finance," Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 40(3), pages 279-299, July.
    19. Eladio Febrero & Maria-Angeles Cadarso, 2006. "Pay-As-You-Go versus funded systems. Some critical considerations," Review of Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(3), pages 335-357.
    20. Scott T. Fullwiler, 2005. "Paying Interest on Reserve Balances: It’s More Significant than You Think," Journal of Economic Issues, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 39(2), pages 543-550, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:blkpoe:v:39:y:2012:i:1:p:121-136. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.