Abstract
By the autumn of 2011, nearly two years had passed since the official end of the Great Recession and the US economy was growing at a steady (if unspectacular) pace. However, the national unemployment rate remained stubbornly at nine percent. Attempting to address this problem, in September of that year, Barack Obama unveiled the American Jobs Act — a $447 billion programme of tax cuts and new spending. By supplying tax breaks to businesses that hired new workers and providing federal money to states and municipalities for infrastructure improvement and school modernisation, the White House sought to create jobs indirectly. At the same time, it also hoped that the package would secure some Republican Party support. This was not to be. Indeed, rather than supporting the legislation, Republicans within the Senate killed the bill through a filibuster. As a result, the Obama administration's major attempt to tackle mass unemployment ended in defeat.
As Steven Attewell reminds us in People Must Live By Work, there was a time in the not-so-distant past when leading members of the Democratic Party championed and managed to enact much more expansive job creation initiatives. In the US, governmental job creation programmes reached their apogee during the Great Depression. Convinced that the ‘direct hiring of the unemployed [was] the most efficient means of boosting consumer spending and reducing unemployment’ and that the ‘unemployed preferred work over relief’, in 1935 the Roosevelt administration created the Works Progress Administration (WPA) (pp. 64–65). In the years that followed, the White House strengthened its commitment to direct job creation. Between 1935 and 1937, the federal government spent an average of $4.2 billion each year on direct job creation programmes; by the end of 1938, nearly 3.5 million Americans worked for the WPA (pp. 103–104). As a result, during the Great Depression, the federal government provided millions of Americans and their families with ‘a frugal but decent wage while producing public works of value at a low cost’ (p. 126).
Though the WPA was terminated in 1943, support for direct job creation among several leading members of the Democratic Party remained strong. In 1945 and 1946, leading liberals in Congress pushed for the enactment of full employment legislation (the subject of the book's fourth chapter). During the initial debates over the form that this legislation should take, many suggested that the state should act as an employer of last resort just as it had during the Great Depression. In the end, though, the bill was ‘strip[ped] down to its least controversial components’ and the leading proponents of the legislation ‘actively distanced themselves from the WPA’ and direct job creation more generally (p. 159).
Calls for the federal government to tackle mass unemployment through direct job creation resurfaced in the mid-1960s when various civil rights groups and labour unions lobbied for public works programmes to be incorporated into the Johnson administration's War on Poverty. In the face of this pressure, the Democratic Party vowed, in its 1968 Party Platform, that ‘for those who cannot obtain other employment, the federal government will be the employer of last resort’ (p. 207). Eight years later, when the Democrats regained the White House, long-time proponents of direct job creation attempted to make good on this pledge. But (just as in 1946) the enacted legislation, the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act, did not contain any formal commitment to direct job creation and many provisions of the legislation were never enforced. With the ‘Reagan revolution’ gaining momentum, no further opportunities to ‘make direct job creation the law of the land’ presented themselves during the final decades of the twentieth century (p. 261).
Much of People Must Live to Work is worth recommending. The book's six chapters are packed with useful details and incisive historical and historiographical analysis. Even when discussing topics that have received much scholarly attention, this book offers the reader plenty of original insights and information. For policy historians interested in the finer details of the WPA, the 1946 Full Employment Bill, the 1965 Freedom Budget, and the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act, People Must Live By Work will be an illuminating and thought-provoking read. At the same time, though, I suspect that many will crave a clearer conceptual explanation of the reasons why direct job creation was put into practice during the New Deal era, but why subsequent attempts ended in failure and why the idea of direct job creation never returned to political centre stage during the economic doldrums of the early 1980s or early 2010s.