• Since we’ve been keeping such data, starting the 1970s, the unemployment rate for African Americans has been twice that of whites. It is this vise grip on the economically vulnerable to which the job guarantee responds. Add in the unemployed and underemployed, and this gives us more than 35 million workers in this program and, quite possibly, many more. If so, local governments in the pilot areas will find themselves having to essentially re-create the private low-wage labor market by undertaking a huge expansion of public-sector jobs. If we try only the job guarantee and our suspicion that it calls for an unrealistic expansion of the public sector is correct, the cause of a national jobs program could suffer a setback.

Source: Washington Post May 14, 2018 10:07 UTC