Why Has Labor Not Demanded Guaranteed Employment?

Unemployment has almost always been traumatic for its victims. In earlier times, it threatened extreme privation, if not starvation. Still today, it dramatically decreases its victims’ standard of living, human capital, social standing, and self-respect. It is associated with poorer health, family dissolution, and suicide. Unemployment also entails considerable costs to society such as lost output, increased crime, decayed neighborhoods, and when extreme, political unrest. Why, then, is it tolerated? Why, especially, have workers and their advocates not demanded that employment be guaranteed to all? This article explores why what has always been foremost to workers’ interests—security of employment—has only rarely resulted in a demand for guaranteed employment. Although many employed workers might feel job-secure and thus see little need for guaranteed employment, all are vulnerable to the overpoweringly seductive dominant ideology serving the interests of the owners of the means of production that blames the unemployed for their fate, creating hostility to the very idea of guaranteed employment. This article explores the history of how this ideology has served to block creation of a basic human right to work.