But a lesser-known policy may be just as good — if not better — at helping recipients support their families, secure stable housing and pay their bills: universal basic employment.
“Job Guarantee is really a public job option. It’s a basic job that’s available regardless of the state of the economy,” said Pavlina Tcherneva, an economics professor at Bard College who wrote a book on UBE benefits. Business Insider.
In fact, now might be the perfect time to do it. The latest jobs report for July came in well below expectations, with the unemployment rate rising to 4.3%. While this is still low by historical standards, it could signal weakness in what has been a very strong job market in recent years. The job guarantee would be a cushion, just in case the economy goes downhill from here.
“You need health insurance even if you’re not sick,” Tcherneva said. “It’s a safety net.”
“We can implement it now when the economy is in a relatively calm state and then be ready when business conditions slow and people are laid off,” she added.
Countries including India, Argentina and Austria have tested guaranteed work programs on a small scale. It has yet to reach the US, despite progressive lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ayanna Pressley wants to implement the policy federally. However, the first US pilot program will launch in Cleveland, and its founder, Devin Cotten, believes that guaranteeing jobs for Americans can win support across party lines.
“We see UBE as the bipartisan solution that has the ability to go across the country and reach both sides of the aisle,” Cotten, who has made a career leading community development task forces in Cleveland, told BI. . In a “work-centric” society, “being able to subsidize people through work allows us to talk to both sides of the aisle and really get that collective buy-in.”
Cleveland jobs guarantee
For Cotten, providing jobs to every American who needs one is a no-brainer. The government pays for roads and development; “Why don’t we subsidize individual agency and prosperity for the nearly 40 million Americans living in poverty?”
With the help of local Cleveland experts and policymakers, Cotten created a pilot group of UBE to begin in 2026. How it works: 100 participants selected from a pool of applicants will be guaranteed a $50,000 job in year for three years. According to the Federal Reserve’s calculations, a worker earning that wage in Cleveland would not need additional public assistance.
The program will cooperate with public and private employers in the area and subsidize the wages of participants. Cotten said the goal is to make sure the jobs are community-based and help strengthen the local economy — think small businesses, nonprofits and childcare — so participants are more likely to gain satisfaction. from work.
“Not only will it stabilize your workforce, but you have less employee turnover and you have less no-shows because of transportation, child care, care for older adults,” Cotten said., adding that an engaged and well-paid workforce is also a more sustainable and effective force.
It’s just a start, Cotten said, and he hopes it will gain more momentum across the country. Lawmakers have floated the idea for decades, going back to former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1944 push to establish “the right to useful and remunerative work in the Nation’s industries, shops, farms or mines.”
Since then, a chorus of Democrats have called for a federal jobs guarantee, including Sanders during his 2016 presidential campaign. Pressley reintroduced a resolution in February calling for a program that would provide high-quality positions paying $25 per hour or more. But UBE has yet to have an Andrew Yang – a rabid advocate with a single-minded focus on rallying support for the idea.
Blocking a guaranteed jobs program largely comes down to unanswered questions about how much it would cost — leaving both Democrats and Republicans on the fence. Rep. Gerald Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia, told The Washington Post in 2018 that his party had to be careful when it came to cost, or Republicans would quickly shoot down the idea. “We must be the party of fiscal responsibility,” he said.
Tcherneva said the logistics of UBE are more complicated than simply giving people checks through basic income programs, but the benefits would include fighting inflation by setting a minimum living wage without raising prices elsewhere and preventing labor shortages by providing a ready and willing workforce.
She thinks UBE is on par with Social Security as a way to support economic stability and that pilot programs are unnecessary.
“We didn’t really pilot public education to find out if we wanted it,” Tcherneva said.
Universal basic employment across the globe
The world’s first universal job guarantee experiment began in 2020 in the Austrian city of Marienthal.
Throughout the three-year program, any resident who had previously been unemployed for at least nine months can choose to opt into the program and receive guaranteed work paying at least $1,800 per month. Participating employers received subsidies to help pay for participants.
By the end of 2023, the program had successfully created and filled 112 new jobs. Most participants joined the public service sector, working in fields such as gardening, community restoration and museums.
Lukas Lehner, an Oxford University economist and co-author of a study measuring the program’s results, told BI that the program aims to create meaningful jobs for workers and the community.
“One of the premises of the whole program was not to dig holes and fill them back in,” Lehner said, adding that researchers observed positive social outcomes in addition to financial benefits, including an increased sense of inclusion, confidence and stability.
The pilot program yielded promising results: unemployment in Marienthal was “massively reduced,” Lehner said, with participants’ incomes increasing by about 30%. Along with significant improvements in financial security, participants also reported improvements in their mental health and purpose in their community that come with knowing they have meaningful and stable work.
Other countries have experimented with job guarantees over the years, including India, Argentina and South Africa, and while they were short-lived — South Africa’s program, for example, was in response to the pandemic — Tcherneva said they all show that the policy can help stabilize the local economy. Tcherneva said it’s like stopping a chain reaction before it starts.
“Unemployment seems to lie at the heart of many other challenging social problems. So if you create employment, you may be able to address them,” she said.
The programs also provide a blueprint for similar initiatives in the future.
“It’s clear that these countries are not as rich as the United States,” Tcherneva said. “They are able to provide work and administrative burdens or other common concerns do not seem to prevent them from providing the necessary employment.”
UBE vs. UBI
When looking at the results of Austria’s pilot program and its impact on Marienthal, Maximilian Kasy, an Oxford University professor and co-author of the study on that program, told BI that it is clear that income alone is not enough to improve the lives of people.
“All these benefits that people experience in terms of their time structure and social inclusion, their sense of meaning and purpose in life, they’re not driven by them simply having more income. They’re really driven from those who have this meaningful activity in the community, that they are engaged”, said Kasy.
While many cities are testing basic income programs, they have not been universal and instead target specific groups in need such as artists, young parents, low-income families or people experiencing homelessness. Tcherneva pointed to the government’s stimulus controls during the pandemic as the “closest real-world experiment” to UBI, during which financial relief was necessary but not long-lasting.
Tcherneva calls the UBE an automatic stabilizer, or a program that smooths out a sudden economic hardship — much like being unemployed when you’re laid off.
Another key element of UBE is its potential to win bipartisan support over UBI, advocates say. Republican lawmakers have introduced bills to ban basic income programs in their states, with some arguing that handing out checks without strings attached would discourage work and raise taxes.
UBE can counter these criticisms by requiring participants to work for their wages—which are taxed as regular income—rather than just taking money each month. The benefits of this would be long-term, helping not only the participants but also their families and employers.
Globally, UBE is gaining an increasingly strong influence in some countries. The European Commission announced €23 million in funding in April for guaranteed jobs proposals in the European Union and France has an ongoing experiment, which began in 2011 and Parliament extended to 2021, to create permanent employment for those in need.
However, while it is growing in other countries, it is up to American policymakers to guarantee jobs at the federal level.
“What we’re trying to do is shift government investment from reactionary responses to proactive solutions,” Cotten said. “And if we can do that by demonstrating why dignifying historically low-wage jobs that are very, very critical to our community can solve the issue of poverty and also dignify people in the process.”