6 - Benchmarking the Right to Work

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The prevailing view among both progressive and conservative economists in the United States today is that unemployment cannot be driven much below the 4 to 6 percent range – well above the 2% level that progressive economists in the 1940s considered achievable (Clark et al. 1949, 14).

This is an uncomfortable reminder that in an earlier era progressives had higher hopes concerning the possibilities for eliminating involuntary unemployment than they do today. In the 1940s, progressives thought they could guarantee the availability of enough good jobs to provide decent work for all job-seekers, thereby moving from a world of perennial job shortages to one of sustained “full employment” in which the “right to work” would be secured. Today, few progressive economists (and fewer still of those who have the ear of progressive policy makers) think that goal is achievable. Instead, they implicitly or explicitly accept the view that job shortages are either inevitable in a market economy or cannot be eliminated except by making unacceptable sacrifices in job quality, and that public policy accordingly should aim to ameliorate the bad effects of those shortages rather than eliminate them.

Why does this matter? It matters because the achievement of full, and decent, employment occupies a foundational role in the vision of a good society – that has guided progressive reform efforts ever since the end of World War II – was built in the 1940s, and for which no satisfactory substitute has yet to been found.