The Job Guarantee and Transformational Degrowth

B. J. Unti
Additional contact information
B. J. Unti: University of Missouri Kansas City

Chapter Chapter 3 in Full Employment and Social Justice, 2018, pp 63-82 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The job guarantee was designed to address the problems of unemployment. However, in light of the environmental crisis, it is important to recognize the ways in which this policy proposal may be harnessed to cope with broader issues of social justicesocial justice and ecological sustainabilityecological sustainability . This chapter looks specifically at how the vision of a job guarantee program aligns with and promotes the burgeoning movement of degrowth. In this respect, the most important feature of the job guarantee is that it eliminates the profit constraint on employment. With a job guarantee in place, the working class will not be hostage to profit-driven economic growth to secure an income. Under the existing paradigm of global capitalism, the world population faces a trade-off between ecological and economic prosperity. By severing the link between aggregate demand and employment, a job guarantee offers possibilities for an ecologically sustainable future without unemployment. In other words, a job guarantee decouples employment from economic growth and establishes a path for the reconciliation of economic and environmental goals. This chapter discusses the ways in which a job guarantee may be utilized to buttress the social justice and environmental aspirations of degrowth.

Keywords: Full employmentFull Employment; degrowthDegrowth; outputOutput; Economic growthEconomic Growth; productionProduction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:bifchp:978-3-319-66376-0_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9783319663760

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-66376-0_3

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().