Job Guarantee – Action Project

Job Guarantee Action Project

The Job Guarantee is an idea whose time is fast approaching

Mission

Our mission is to use the arts, both works of art and the vision of a Job Guarantee for Artists, to raise public awareness regarding the merits, popularity, and viability of the Job Guarantee; as well as to model for political leaders how to talk about it to the public.

Vision

Our vision is a world where the right to a decent-paying, dignified job with full benefits is recognized and upheld as a human right of all, with a wide array of public service jobs to choose from, including jobs in public arts.

Initiatives

The above video is an example of the kind of video we plan to commission.

Our first initiative is to raise money to commission an animated video telling the story of Coretta Scott King’s Job Guarantee advocacy in the 1970s, and the fork in the road we faced on the eve of de-industrialization, framing the Job Guarantee as the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement, and the antidote to mass incarceration.

Our second initiative would be to raise money to commission another animated video, this one telling the story of the Federal Art Project during the New Deal, and laying out the vision for a Job Guarantee for Artists as part of a broader Job Guarantee program. This would be meant to show the broad potential for varieties of employment that would be possible under a Job Guarantee, but also to provide a vision for the flourishing of public arts and the liberation of artists from the pressures of commercialism.

Board of directors

Advisory council

History & Premise

The Job Guarantee was pioneered by Sadie Alexander, America’s first Black economist, during the Great Depression.
It was later adopted by FDR as part of his proposed Bill of Economic Rights
It was a centerpiece of the policy agenda of the Civil Rights Movement, and was a key demand of the Freedom Budget. The March on Washington was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
In the 1970s Coretta Scott King mobilized over a million people to demonstrate in favor of a Job Guarantee, nearly getting it passed in 1978 as part of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act.
In 2018 the Job Guarantee (JG) re-emerged from decades in the political wilderness when several Democratic presidential hopefuls came out in support of some version of the idea.

In 2019 the idea was enshrined in the Green New Deal resolution.
In the 2020 Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders was the main torchbearer of the proposal, though he did not make it a centerpiece of his campaign.
The JG polls well (78% in two separate polls), but people still don’t know about it, let alone have the level of familiarity necessary for deep, firm support.
The next step in the fight for a Job Guarantee is to raise the public’s level of awareness and familiarity with the idea, so as to deepen support, thereby ratcheting up the pressure on politicians to make a Job Guarantee a centerpiece of their agenda.
To do so, a campaign focused specifically on the Job Guarantee is needed.

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