Economix Blog: Nancy Folbre: A Real Right to Work

Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She recently edited and contributed to “For Love and Money: Care Provision in the United States.”

All Americans willing and able to work have a right to paid employment. If the private sector can’t generate sufficient jobs, the public sector should provide them.

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This definition of “right to work” obviously differs from the one that Republican legislators in Michigan deployed when they passed a new law absolving workers from the responsibility of paying union fees even if they gain contract benefits from them. But perhaps their actions will dramatize the need to challenge their framing and reclaim the genuine meaning of the phrase.

Most of us live in a world in which paid employment is the only avenue to economic self-sufficiency. Without it, families maintained by working-age adults are largely dependent on the kindness of strangers, otherwise known as extended unemployment insurance and food stamps. Yet, for more than four years, this nation has tolerated levels of unemployment that have essentially made it impossible for most of those seeking paid employment to find it, with a ratio of unemployed workers to job openings of more than three to one.

Some Republicans have long insisted that many of the jobless, relaxing in a billowy social safety net, simply aren’t trying hard enough to find a job. My fellow Economix contributor Casey Mulligan makes a similar argument when he contends that the poverty rate should have risen ­between 2007 and 2011, but didn’t ­because public assistance was neutralizing the effect of job loss and undermining incentives to work.

But Shawn Fremstad of the Center for Economic Policy and Research challenges that methodology, pointing to measurements showing that the poverty rate did rise significantly among working-age adults over this period.

Further, increased unemployment contributed to economic stress across most of the social spectrum, not just among the poor and near poor. Between 2007 and 2011, average household income declined in all four bottom quintiles.

Expansion of unemployment insurance and means-tested benefits are not the best solution to persistently high unemployment. As John Stuart Mill emphasized many years ago, those who are capable of supporting themselves should not rely on the habitual aid of others. But Mill went on to explain why such aid is sometimes necessary:

Energy and self-dependence are, however, liable to be impaired by the absence of help, as well as by its excess. It is even more fatal to exertion to have no hope of succeeding by it, than to be assured of succeeding without it. When the condition of any one is so disastrous that his energies are paralyzed by discouragement, assistance is a tonic, not a sedative: it braces instead of deadening the active faculties.

Paralysis by discouragement is a pretty good description of a growing segment of the United States population. In general, the higher the unemployment rate in a state, the higher the percentage of discouraged workers (those who did not search for work in the previous four weeks, for the specific reason that they believed no jobs were available for them) and the higher the percentage of marginally attached workers (those who did not search for work in the previous four weeks, for any reason).

Labor force participation has declined significantly since the last recession began, especially among less-educated men.

The best way to encourage American workers, increase family income and reduce public spending on unemployment insurance and food stamps is to create more jobs. The simplest way to create more jobs is to increase public-sector employment. The federal government could also invest in programs to encourage small businesses to hire workers to improve our aging physical infrastructure (including roads and bridges), our social infrastructure (including early childhood education and home services for the elderly) and our environmental sustainability (including improved energy efficiency and installation of the solar voltaic technologies that Germany now heavily relies upon).

All these investments offer a high social rate of return that private businesses can’t easily capture on their own.

By contrast, there is no evidence that lower tax rates for the rich promote either job creation or economic growth (a detailed study on this topic by the Congressional Research Service was withdrawn as a direct result of Republican protest).

President Obama and Congressional Democrats have called for more stimulus spending aimed at job creation, only to meet tremendous opposition from Republicans. Preoccupation with deficit reduction has crowded out discussion of job creation. Public employment grew steadily during the previous Bush administration. During the Obama administration, however, it has significantly declined.

Now, it appears that any remaining concern with job creation may be thrown over the fiscal cliff.

The next time someone with a comfortable paycheck tells you that American workers no longer have a work ethic, please explain to them that right now, there’s not enough paid work to go around.

Which is why we should fight for a real right to work.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/a-real-right-to-work/?partner=rss&emc=rss