#jobguarantee — Public Fediverse posts

"This paper employs the concept of “enshittification”—the systematic degradation of a service or product in the pursuit of profit—as a powerful metaphor to analyze the decay of the US labor market in the postwar era. Situating this process within Hyman Minsky’s theory of capitalist development, it argues that the current phase of money manager capitalism has accelerated a pervasive “bait-and-switch” dynamic that has emerged since the 1970s. The “bait” was the postwar social contract, which promised but never guaranteed economic security through tight full employment and access to good jobs for all. The “switch” was the neoliberal policy shift that dismantled labor protections, weaponized unemployment (via the NAIRU doctrine), and fostered financialization, leading to stagnant wages, precarity, and household indebtedness. The “trap” is the worker’s inescapable dependency for survival on a job within a system that uses the threat of unemployment as a policy tool. The paper identifies the erosion of four key forces—competition, regulation, interoperability, and worker power, all of which held the tenuous postwar contract together—as the drivers of this enshittification. It concludes by articulating how the federal job guarantee proposal can act as a systemic circuit breaker capable of reverse reengineering the labor market. The job guarantee is not only an alternative to precarious employment and the NAIRU policy framework, but also a comprehensive de facto regulator that introduces much needed competition for labor by firms in the economy. The paper evaluates how the program can introduce countervailing forces to arrest the degradation of the labor market and establish a new standard for good jobs, thereby laying the foundation for a renewed social contract."

https://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/the-death-of-the-social-contract-and-the-enshittification-of-jobs/

#Enshittification #Financialization #Economy #JobGuarantee #Capitalism #Unemployment #Neoliberalism

I think I agree with almost every proposal stated in this text:

"With regards to information, the challenge is to design intellectual property laws that restrict the right of private parties with proprietary knowledge to extort the rest of society and stifle innovation in the process. This means shortening the life of patents and increasing the requirements for awarding one. At least in certain critical fields of knowledge production, such as life-saving medicine, a strong case can even be made for scrapping patents altogether in favor of a fixed number of payments to inventors of new drugs and treatments. Financing open-source platforms, coding languages, and hardware is another avenue for democratizing control over information.

Under the umbrella of predistribution, we can also place policies that significantly affect the broader economic environment. Antitrust laws are one example. By aggressively curtailing anticompetitive practices, regulators prevent the dominant firms in any given sector from calcifying their power on the market over sellers and buyers alike.

Another example of a predistributive policy is the much-debated national job guarantee. Such a policy would force the private sector to contract on terms that are at least as desirable as those found outside of it — or face a drying up of applicants.

Now, it is not my intent to offer a full-throated defense of these policies, some of which recommend themselves better than others. My aim is rather to draw attention to the thread that is common to all of them. By recognizing that the market rewards relative scarcity, predistribution acts to shift the power that accrues to asset holders in societies characterized by highly unequal ownership."

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/left-inequality-predistribution-economic-policy

#Predistribution #LaborLaw #JobGuarantee #Redistribution #PoliticalEonomy #Inequality