The writer doesn't justify his insistence that a Job Guarantee "IS NOT ‘MAKE-WORK’". It seems to me that if the primary purpose of a job is to provide work, then it is by definition make-work.
IMO, that's much less make-work than advertising, sales and similar (basically, jobs that exist because your product is not good enough to sell itself).
Then the government decided things had to be more fair (we're talking early eighties), so people suddenly had to fill in forms defining exactly how many hours they spent on helping out family to get the amount of money they deserve. Or something like that. The point was that there was this new layer of bureaucratic administration. It was a disaster, and within a few years they rolled it back. By then however, a lot of volunteers had simply given up and stopped helping, and they did not come back. And in the last decade we made the same mistake all over again.
What's especially important to note was that under the new rules, people on average would have been paid more for their help - the old compensation was not nearly enough to cover the time and costs of the volunteers. And yet we ended up with less volunteers.
Almost all of the examples you mentioned are things people do for other reasons than the money; any monetary compensation should be more of a hassle-free symbolic gesture of appreciation, or it ruins the whole intrinsic motivation. People are irrational like that, and we need to respect that if we want to make this work.
For example, I've been asked to:
* Fold letters, put them into envelopes, and manually address the envelopes.
* Deliver centrally-printed documents to people a long way from the printer.
* Manually sort paper files into alphabetical order.
* Sharpen colouring pencils by hand.
If "Job Guarantee" employees are effectively free labour, my fear is they'd end up being assigned to do jobs that would only cost a few hundred dollars to automate out of existence. It's my personal experience that doing such jobs manually is pretty unsatisfying (and economically inefficient to boot).
And people wonder why the public always gets the short end of the stick.
He lists a number of ideas for jobs in this article: http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2014/01/07/bop-a-mole-2-j...
All of this smells of replacing capitalist oppression with bureaucratic oppression. All for their own good, of course.
That article dispels that concern and many others that I had about such a program. Thanks for sharing it!
I think this is a really important quote from the article. In such a rich society (USA, Australia, Canada, Britain, wherever..) it seems sort of unnecessary that we'd force wages to be so low they are barely above the poverty line.
But I'm not entirely sure how this fits into a global economy. If workers in China are working for cents there is no way a similar industry in Australia can compete with a minimum wage of $18 an hour. We've seen this in textile manufacturing in particular.
I'm also not sure what the views will be when we've magically automated nearly everything. Eventually there is not going to be enough work for everyone. Will we finally decide that "work" isn't necessary for everyone and allow time to be spent on travel, family, and fun? Or will we invent things to do for the sake of contributing?
Just tossing out random thoughts I've had over the last few years.
This has been discussed to death here in Portugal. Portugal had, up until the 90s, a strong textile and shoe making industry. It moved to the east during the late nineties, early noughties. Strangely, the last five years have seen a renaissance.
Our cost of labor, while cheap in EU terms is orders of magnitude above eastern countries. The explanation for the resurgence of the industry is twofold: a) Cost of labor accounts for less than one third of final product cost; b) Logistics advantages can easily recover the cost difference. Think short lead times, work force adaptability, higher automation, lower defect ratios, smaller inventory. Couple this with fashion sticking less and less to two collections per year (and going for high adaptability during the season), and you get a competitive advantage China and Vietnam do not have.