Federal Guarantee

Topic Analysis Introduction With the end of October, we are now on our second topic of the season. Resolved: The ought to provide a federal jobs guarantee.

Much like the September/October topic, this one is timely in terms of the current environment. Where the last topic ends as the next United States election takes place, the November/December topic arrives with Congress having failed to renew Covid-19 relief, an economy which continues to face a downturn due to both the shut downs earlier in the year, and an rate which is higher than many other recessions with little economic growth being seen on the horizon (Iacurci, 2020). At the same time, debates concerning a federal jobs guarantee (FJG) versus other options such as a (UBI) are mainstays within the Democratic Party, while -For-All continues to be advocated at the same time (Keshner, 2019).

The result of this is a topic which will require both long term and short term knowledge of economic and political events which have shaped and social choices. While easily conceived of as a discussion of only the economic conditions, the implications of jobs have been demonstrated to have long lasting influences on education, health, technology, integration, environmental degradation, and many other areas of public policy. This means that both sides will have access to a plethora of potential avenues while arguing why the affirmative is needed both at this particular time in history and in the future. Guarantee The discussion of the federal jobs guarantee will, for better or worse, the only area for topic discussion. For more technical debaters, there are multiple versions with differing levels of benefits and wages, as well as differences in whether they are graduated depending upon experience. Within the literature, these plans are unambiguously including in what it means to have a federal jobs guarantee, even if the authors debate which avenue is the best for implementation (Paul et al., 2018; Tcherneva, 2018).

What will be critical for debaters is to have isolated how they wish to defend the compensation for employment. Programs with higher wages and benefits are undoubtedly better for those who take on these positions but are simultaneously more likely to crowd out private sector jobs and result in prices spikes in other industries as businesses adjust (Citation Needed). At the same time, a failure to implement a large enough policy risks doing nothing in the face of ongoing economic concerns, as well as making it easier for a well-designed counterplan to resolve the harms of the affirmative. Our recommendation is for a middle ground, articulated best by Pavlina R. Tcherneva, in terms of compensation. In her book The Case for A Job Guarantee, Tcherneva lays out the defense for both the job guarantee and the use of it for green programs (2020). These programs would most likely include a $15 wage in addition to ample and wide ranging benefits.

When evaluating this topic as a debater then, it is best to consider three primary dimensions along which the affirmative and negative are negotiating. These are laid out in more detail shortly, but boil down to the practical versus philosophical divide, unemployment versus , and private versus public. Each version of the FJG and negative counterplans make decisions along these dimensions in terms of concessions, concern, or advocacy. However, while there are three primary dimensions for the debate, this is not to say that all strategies that are preferred will necessarily employ them all equally (if at all). Practical versus Philosophical This topic introduces to LD one of the more tenuously attached topics to the traditional view of philosophical argumentation. Where the previous topic opened up the possibility of a wide discussion of democracy and what it means to be citizen (even if this discussion was not always embraced by the debaters in round), this topic’s philosophical takes quickly run aground against the questions of practicality that must also be addressed. This is more true for the affirmative than the negative, but the deployment of libertarianism or other conservative philosophy in terms of the role of government may quickly find themselves in need of practical argumentation, which then negates the advantage of a more philosophical case.

For the affirmative, there is some amount of development of Rawlsian arguments such as his Veil of Ignorance and discussions of Justice which can still be deployed (Rawls, 2013). These arguments would center on the need for gainful employment in terms of both receiving a wage as well as necessary benefits in order for survival, but also to have them at such a level that thriving is also possible for those individuals who are employed by the jobs guarantee. However, while these arguments can be developed, the shape of the topic does not allow for them to be considered on a purely philosophical ground. There are multiple programs, attempted domestically but more fully embraced in other countries, which have each been forced to deal with their own complexities due to cultural and social differences (Paul et al. 2018). Given that the topic is not one of the role of government (such as that the US should prioritize reducing unemployment), but rather a discussion of how best to do so, the standard arguments of the rounds not being policy are both unpersuasive and unstrategic. Establishing a moral call for a FJG most likely requires that it not merely gesture towards eliminating unemployment, but also that it do so in a way that is actually beneficial for society. Due to this, affirmatives may quickly find themselves in position where it is more strategic to embrace a consequentialist frame.

The negative, on the other hand, does have the opportunity for a purely philosophical take condemning the governments intervention in markets in its entirety via libertarianism. These views are fairly common within LD resolutions, but may find themselves in a difficult position. The ideological positioning on current social safety nets against the jobs guarantee is often difficult to parse. Some argue that the jobs guarantee is a preferable program due to its requirement to work, while others contend that there is a need to remove all government program. As a consequence, negatives need to both come in with a concrete stance of what the world looks like post embracing libertarian philosophy and what it means for other social programs. It will be difficult to argue at this current moment that there is no need for social programs, especially as affirmatives will be describing an economy which is increasingly perilous all economically. Unemployment versus Inflation For economists, this debate is unsurprisingly less about the philosophical reasons for and against its implementation, but instead a question of unintended consequences. Due to its presence as the bedrock material needed for all economic activity, it is unsurprising that the labor market is able to influence the prices and availability of all other goods and services. This means that a reduction in unemployment (otherwise known as a tight labor market), can have adverse effects on the prices of goods overall. This is due to rising wages. For the past few decades, despite productivity rising, the overall wages in real terms for workers in the United States economy has been relatively stagnant (Gould, 2020). Without rising wages, there has not been the same level of inflationary pressure on goods throughout the economy, but if a FJG is able to end all unemployment (or at least get it down to 1 to 2%), then there would be extreme pressure on wages and benefits to rise to at least the level of the FJG if not higher. The result would be a choice for businesses. They can either accept the losses from higher pay (unlikely), cut jobs (most likely to happen but a FJG would then provide an alternative), or raise prices in order to maintain profit margins (will most likely happen alongside cutting jobs).

The question then, is how much inflation occurs when unemployment declines. Since the 2008 recession, this has been an open debate. Bond markets the world over are currently at incredibly low interest rates, indicating that investors are looking to protect their money, not invest it (Moisand, 2020). If this is the case, then companies (and those who own them) may view the losses of higher wages/compensation to be more acceptable than at other times. Additionally, even if wages are increasing, businesses are, by and large, facing a similar situation and therefore would still have competitive pressures on prices overall. So long as these conflicting pressures are strong enough, the overall increase in prices should not be greater than the increase in wages are for individuals. To make this simpler, businesses are unlikely to pass 100% of the increase in wages on to consumers, and so long as that increase is less than 100% of the increase in wages, there should be an increase in real wages overall.

Unemployment, on the other hand, is unambiguously reduced via a FJG. The history of the United States is one of exclusion when it comes to access to high paying and well compensated jobs for women and individuals of color, and as a result, a FJG has been proposed as capable of resolving these inequities (Treuhaft & Blackwell, 2020). Between its ease of access for all individuals as well as the argued for compensation, it would provide an avenue for supplementing the economic needs of individuals who must confront structural barriers between them and a more secure livelihood. Unemployment, even if only transient, can have severe implications for health, both mental and physical, as well as be damaging for long term employment prospects if it fails to be resolved rapidly. Private versus Public Finally, this debate can boil down to a question: are jobs provided through the public sector comparable/preferable to those in the private sector? In an idealized implementation of the FJG, it would be implemented, compete and improve other jobs through that competition, and then slowly be reduced in size as individuals re-enter the private work force. Unfortunately, such idealized results are likely to be difficult to attain overall.

If businesses decide to avoid the cost increase through automation. The covid-19 pandemic has accelerated many of the plans to automate the work forces of various businesses, and a sudden increase in wages and compensation through public job competition would inevitably push that even further (Karsten & West, 15). If true, the FJG may permanently reduce the overall options for jobs, while not providing avenues for individuals to move up through a businesses for better pay. Essentially, without a plan for training and advancement, the FJG may not provide the best option for individuals to improve upon their welfare long term, and rather stick them at whatever level the FJG is set to, a dubious proposition given the lack of raising of the in recent years. Additionally, private sector jobs are often preferable in the sense that they meet a specific need within the economy. A FJG would beg the question of to what purpose they should be put to. For affirmatives in technical debate, this can be a boon as there are many options and scenarios that can be researched and developed into cases: transportation, green jobs, beautification and park projects, childcare, etc. For those in a traditional circuit, the broad strokes of these can be explained and defended, transportation and green jobs in particular, but may not have the benefit of using a more detailed plan for implementation. Additionally, without having seen a works project of this sort implemented for the purposes of a single goal in recent history, it is difficult to assess the extent to which it would be successful. This is before considering if this would be the permanent goal of a FJG, or if it would be capable of being repurposed from time to time to a new goal as needed. Outlook The file for DFW this month is primarily designed to focus on the broad economic ramifications of implementing a federal jobs guarantee. While there is flexibility in terms of how the affirmative is deployed in terms of both which populations are specified and how they are helped, or what purpose these jobs are put towards, the negative is generally left with a similar set of arguments regardless of the specifics. Instead, the mechanisms of solving can be generally criticized in a similar manner regardless.

Best of luck!

References

Gould, E. (2020, February 20). State of Working America Wages 2019: A story of slow, uneven, and unequal wage growth over the last 40 years. Retrieved October 14, 2020, from https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/

Iacurci, G. (2020, October 13). Unemployment was supposed to be temporary. Now, it's permanent for almost 4 million. Retrieved October 14, 2020, from https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/13/covid- related-unemployment-is-now-permanent-for-almost-4-million.html

Karsten, J., & West, D. (2016, July 29). Rising minimum wages make automation more cost-effective. Retrieved October 14, 2020, from https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2015/09/30/rising- minimum-wages-make-automation-more-cost-effective/

Keshner, A. (2019, October 17). As Democrats spar over guaranteed jobs, universal basic income and $15 minimum wage, which would best help Americans? Retrieved October 14, 2020, from https://www.marketwatch.com/story/democratic-candidates-ask-if-guaranteed-jobs-universal- basic-income-or-a-15-minimum-wage-would-best-help-americans-2019-10-17

Moisand, D. (2020, May 05). What's the best bond investment when interest rates are so low? Retrieved October 14, 2020, from https://www.marketwatch.com/story/whats-the-best-bond-investment- when-interest-rates-are-so-low-2020-05-05

Paul, M., Darity, W., Jr., & Hamilton, D. (2018, April 25). The Federal Job Guarantee - A Policy to Achieve Permanent . Retrieved October 14, 2020, from https://www.cbpp.org/research/full-employment/the-federal-job-guarantee-a-policy-to-achieve- permanent-full-employment

Rawls, J. (1970). A theory of justice. Harvard University Press.

Tcherneva, P. (2018). The Job Guarantee: Design, Jobs, and Implementation. Manuscript in preparation, The Levy Economics Institute Working Paper Collection, Levy Institute, Annandale-on-Hudson.

Tcherneva, P. R. (2020). The case for a job guarantee. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Treuhaft, S., & Blackwell, A. G. (2020, January 02). A Federal Job Guarantee Is a Crucial Tool to Fight Inequality. Retrieved October 14, 2020, from https://inequality.org/research/federal-job- guarantee/

Cases

Affirmative

1AC I affirm, Resolved: The United States ought to provide a federal jobs guarantee.

Definitions Federal Jobs Guarantee: Bhandari 19, Ryan (former senior policy advisor for Third Way). “What Is the “Federal Jobs Guarantee” and What Are People Saying About It?” Third Way. March 25 2019. https://www.thirdway.org/memo/what-is-the-federal-jobs-guarantee-and-what-are-people-saying- about-it

A federal jobs guarantee is as simple as it sounds on the surface: everyone in the country will be guaranteed a job by the US government should they desire one. There are two versions right now gaining attention. One plan is written by academics Mark Paul, Sandy Darity, and Darrick Hamilton. The other was written by Pavlina Tcherneva. In general, these plans promise: Guaranteed jobs in infrastructure repair, ecological restoration, caregiving, and community development projects. Benefits like health insurance, paid sick leave/vacation, and retirement plans. Control for state and local governments that will decide which kinds of jobs to create. A reduced uptake of welfare programs and unemployment insurance as well as decreased criminal justice costs. The key difference between the two plans is the minimum wage for the new jobs. The Tcherneva plan establishes a $15 minimum wage and the Paul et al. plan calls for an $11.80 minimum wage for all federally guaranteed jobs. Yet, both have the same underlying goal: Permanently solve the problem of by making the federal government the

Value/Criterion

My value is equality.

Bahmueller 2007, Charles (researcher affiliated with the Council for the Advancement of, Washington, Washington, D.C., United States). “The Concepts and Fundamental Principles of Democracy.” Center for Civic Education. 2007. https://www.civiced.org/pdfs/books/ElementsOfDemocracy/Elements_Subsection6.pdf

The political, legal, and moral equality of every citizen is a fundamental value of democracy. These aspects of equality are summarized in the idea that there can be no second-class citizens in a democracy. Thus, according to an old adage, “each is to count for one and for no more than one.” The democratic principle of political equality is that no one is born with the right to rule others; and no one is born with the obligation to political obedience. On account of this elemental political equality, the only way that legitimate political authority can be established is throughthe consent of the governed. Equality in democracy may be said to have the following dimensions: Political equality means that each citizen is to be able to vote in elections and to stand for office. No one is to have more than one vote, and electoral districts are to have approximately the same population so that each vote counts roughly the same. Legal equality means that all persons (noncitizens as well as citizens) are to enjoy the equal protection of the laws. That is, no one is to be discriminated against by law on account of accidents of birth such as race, ethnicity, gender, or ancestry; nor on account of personal choices such as religion, group membership, or occupation. Moral equality means that each citizen (in most circumstances noncitizens as well) is to be given equal concern and respect in the eyes of the law and in the policies of governments. Among the most important forms of democratic equality to be guaranteed by the equal protection of the laws is “equality of opportunity.” This means that law must not unfairly disadvantage anyone in their opportunity to seek a variety of social goods such as education, employment, housing, and political rights. Policies among democracies vary widely with respect to promoting equality of condition (“equality of result” as opposed to “equality of opportunity”) among citizens. “Equality of result,” of wealthor condition, however, is not inherent in the idea of democracy. Democracy tends not to work well, however, in societies in which there are vast disparities of wealth, in the absence of a substantial middle class. Beyond the formal equality of each citizen in a democracy, there can be said to be an informal “spirit of equality” that is manifest in democracies. As democracy deepens in a society, the idea of equality generally spreads to social habits and mores. These aspects of a mature democracy may take a considerable period to develop. Examples of informal equality include the following: citizens treat each other with equal respect, despite differences in wealth and social status; individual merit counts more in the estimation of society than accidents of birth, such as race, gender, and ancestry; consciousness of social hierarchy and class resentment declines. As the result of a prolonged period of equality of opportunity and the freedoms that promote economic prosperity, a middle class grows between rich and poor, adding to political stability. A substantial “middle class” is among the most important characteristics of a stable democratic state.

My Criterion is Mitigating Structural Violence. Winter, D. D., & Leighton, D. C. (2001) . (Professor of Psychology at The Whitman College and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Texas A&M University) Structural violence. In D. J. Christie, R. V. Wag- ner, & D. D. Winter (Eds.), Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century. New York: Prentice-Hall. Accessed: 10/13/20, IM

Direct violence is horrific, but its brutality usually gets our attention: we notice it, and often respond to it. Structural violence, however, is almost always invisible, embedded in ubiquitous social structures, normalized by stable institutions and regular experience. Structural violence occurs whenever people are disadvantaged by political, legal, eco- nomic or cultural traditions. Because they are longstanding, structural inequities usually seem ordinary, the way things are and always have been. The chapters in this sec- tion teach us about some important but invisible forms of structural violence, and alert us to the powerful cultural mechanisms that create and maintain them over generations. Structured inequities produce suffering and death as often as direct violence does, though the damage is slower, more subtle, more common, and more difficult to repair. Globally, is correlated with infant mortality, infectious disease, and shortened lifespans. Whenever people are denied access to societys resources, physical and psychological violence exists. Johan Galtung originally framed the term structural violence to refer to any constraint on human potential due to economic and political structures (1969). Unequal access to resources, to political power, to education, to health care, or to legal standing, are forms of structural violence. When inner city children have inadequate schools while others do not, when gays and lesbians are fired for their sexual orientation, when laborers toil in inhumane conditions, when people of color endure environmental toxins in their neighborhoods, structural violence exists. Unfortunately, even those who are victims of structural violence often do not see the systematic ways in which their plight is choreographed by unequal and unfair distribution of societys resources.

Contention 1: Race Inequality

Structural inequalities are preventing economic equality for many Americans, only the FJG can solve Treuhaft and Blackwell 20 Sarah Treuhaft and Angela Glover Blackwell (managing director and Angela Glover Blackwell is the founder-in-residence at PolicyLink, a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity). “A Federal Job Guarantee Is a Crucial Tool to Fight Inequality.” Inequality. January 02 2020. https://inequality.org/research/federal-job-guarantee/

Skyrocketing inequality and persistent racial inequities are erasing the American dream for all but the lucky few and hobbling true economic prosperity. Tackling this toxic inequality must be the fight of this decade, and doing so requires breaking up the stranglehold of wealth at the top, growing the largest and most diverse middle class in history, and ensuring that no person or family falls below a standard of living that affords them economic security and dignity. One crucial tool that would go a long way toward establishing a new baseline of economic security for all is a Federal Job Guarantee: a public option for a good job that pays a living-wage and offers full benefits on projects that address long-neglected community needs and produce public benefits. Environmental restoration and energy efficiency retrofits to address our climate crisis; sidewalk and street repair, public art, and greening projects to reinvigorate disinvested neighborhoods; and new teachers’ aides, child care workers, and elder care workers to create a care infrastructure are just a few examples of the community-building work that would become possible with a job guarantee. RACIAL INEQUALITYGet the facts Guaranteed jobs would address a key failure of our economy: the inability to provide jobs for all even in the best of times. Today, amidst record-low unemployment, millions of Americans — 11.2 million as of the most recent jobs report — want full-time work but cannot find it. Some 5.8 million workers are actively job-seeking. Another 4.2 million are working part-time but want more hours. And 1.2 million want a job but have given up looking for one. This is a chronic crisis that disproportionately harms Black, brown, and rural communities. A job guarantee would also target our epidemic of low-wage, unstable jobs. A recent Brookings Institution analysis revealed that 44 percent of American workers earn less than $18,000 per year. And the latest Fed study found that 17 percent of workers contend with unpredictable, varying schedules. Guaranteed jobs would provide them with a far better option. A Federal Job Guarantee would set a new, higher standard — not only for wages but also for hours, schedules, and benefits — that private employers would need to compete against to find workers. Ensuring that all who want to work can have a good job would transform our economy. No one would need to go through the devastating experience of not finding employment. Workers facing discrimination because of their race, their gender identity, or for having a criminal record would gain economic opportunity. People stuck in jobs where they are harassed or unsafe would have a viable alternative. Poverty, racial inequity, and working poverty would decline. And, when the next recession hits, workers could take up guaranteed jobs — maintaining consumer demand and moderating the effects of the downturn for workers and businesses alike. This vast potential to deliver on economic security, dignity, and stability is why hundreds of individuals, leaders, and organizations working for racial, economic, and environmental justice have signed on to a Jobs for All manifesto calling on policymakers to enact a job guarantee. We hope that the readers of this blog will also sign on. In putting forth this manifesto, we seek to bolster growing political momentum for a job guarantee. Last fall, Senator and Representatives Bonnie Watson Coleman and Ilhan Omar introduced legislation for a pilot job guarantee program in 15 communities across the country. A job guarantee is also a key feature of the Resolution introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez with 98 cosponsors. And Senator has made a job guarantee a key plank in his agenda in his bid for the presidency A job guarantee is also one of the most popular economic policies around. Multiple polls show that a majority of eligible voters support guaranteed jobs—including a good share of Republicans (48 percent according to one poll). At this time of unprecedented economic and ecological upheaval, it is time for bold policies that move us toward an inclusive and sustainable economy. It is time for a Federal Job Guarantee. Black individuals face higher unemployment rates even at times of economic expansion and receive both lower wages and less benefits. Christian E. Weller 19, (Senior Fellow at American Progress and professor of public policy at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts) 12-5-2019, "African Americans Face Systematic Obstacles to Getting Good Jobs," Center for American Progress, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2019/12/05/478150/african-americans- face-systematic-obstacles-getting-good-jobs/ Accessed: 10/13/20, IM

African American workers regularly face higher unemployment rates than whites. There are several explanations for this. Blacks often face outright discrimination in the labor market.5 They also are less likely to attend and graduate from college, which stems from the fact that African Americans face greater financial barriers to getting a college education,6ending up with more debt than white graduates and paying more for their loans.7 Yet even among college graduates, African Americans often face greater job instability and higher unemployment rates, as the data below show. For a decade now, the unemployment rate has fallen, improving the labor market outlook for many groups along the way. The U.S. unemployment rate for all workers who are 16 years old and older was down to 3.5 percent in September 2019 from its peak of 10 percent in October 2019, reaching its lowest point in 50 years. (see Figure 1) Amid the improving labor market, the African American unemployment rate fell to a historic low of 5.5 percent, and the rate for whites reached a 50-year low of 3.2 percent at the same time. More importantly, the unemployment rate for prime-age workers—those who are ages 25 to 54—fell to an average of 5.2 percent for Black workers and an average of 2.8 percent for whites for the period from November 2018 and October 2019.8 This was the lowest unemployment rate on record for Black prime-age workers dating back to 1973 and the lowest for white prime-age workers since 2000. (see Figure 2) The trend toward ever-lower unemployment rates should not obscure the fact that African Americans systematically suffer higher unemployment rates than whites, even in a good labor market. The unemployment rate for Black workers remains higher than that for white workers even when looking at subpopulations. The data further show that African Americans typically face higher unemployment than whites regardless of age, gender, education, and veteran status. (see Figure 3) Regardless of educational attainment by Black workers, they typically have a higher rate of unemployment than their white college-educated counterparts. Among college graduates, for example, the Black unemployment rate averaged 2.8 percent from November 2018 to October 2019, 40 percent higher than the 2 percent rate for white college graduates in the same period. (see Figure 3) While college attainment helps all workers get more access to better-paying, stable jobs with better benefits, the advantages are not evenly distributed. Black workers, no matter their level of education, still face impediments in the labor market—employment discrimination, occupational segregation, and unequal pay. Black women are caught between bad jobs and widespread financial burdens Black women face unique burdens in the labor market. They are more likely to work than white women: 84.4 percent of Black mothers are breadwinners, which represents a larger share than for any other racial or ethnic group.9 Black women also often shoulder disproportionate financial burdens due to caregiving responsibilities for children, grandchildren, and aging parents.10 Moreover, Black women have a much harder time finding a job than white women and white men. The employed share of Black women was 57.2 percent in September 2019, slightly higher than the 55.2 percent of white women with a job. (see Figure 3) Yet their unemployment rate was 5.1 percent in September 2019, much higher than the 2.7 percent of white women who were out of work and looking for a job during that same period. African American women also work in lower-paying jobs than Black men or white women, which translates to a particularly steep pay gap for Black women. Among those who worked full time all year in 2018, Black women earned 61.9 cents for every dollar that white men earned. In comparison, Black men earned 70.2 cents for every dollar earned by white men, and white women earned 78.6 cents.11 African American women are also more likely than white women to juggle caregiving responsibilities for family members such as children and grandchildren.12 The lack of access to jobs in general, and to good jobs in particular, further exacerbates the financial challenges of these responsibilities. In the same vein, getting more education shrinks the wage gap but doesn’t close it, indicating that Black women face systematic obstacles in getting good jobs.13 Therefore, it is important to note that even obtaining a job, and sometimes a good job, is still not enough for Black women because of systemic barriers—sometimes rooted in race and gender bias—that drive how the U.S. economy values different types of work and the policies available to support women’s caregiving responsibilities. Black workers have less access to jobs than whites Importantly, the employed share of both prime-age Black and white workers was still below the peaks recorded in the late 1990s, suggesting that the labor market is not as strong as the unemployment rate shows. (see Figure 4) Moreover, there is a persistent racial gap. The employed share of prime-age Black workers stood at 75.7 percent from November 2018 to October 2019, while it averaged 80.8 percent for white workers in this age group. (see Figure 4) Even after a decade of labor market gains, Black workers face more impediments to finding work than is the case for white workers. Fewer job opportunities make it harder for people to save for their futures. Black workers have fewer well-paying, stable jobs with decent benefits than white workers The hurdles that African Americans face in the labor market from discrimination, pay inequality, and occupational steering are also apparent in indicators of job quality and not just in measures of job availability. Black workers, for example, typically get paid a great deal less than white workers. The typical median weekly earnings for Black full-time employees was $727 from July 2019 to September 2019, compared with $943 for whites. (see Figure 5) Comparing wages for men and women broken down by race and age again shows that these wage differences persist among full-time workers, indicating that massive gaps in economic security persist even when the labor market is strong. Lower wages for Black workers then translate into lower savings as families have less money left over after paying their bills. African Americans also receive fewer employer-provided benefits than white workers. Only a little more than half of African Americans—55.4 percent—had private health insurance in 2018, compared with 74.8 percent of whites.14 Craig Copeland, a researcher at the Employee Benefits Research Institute, estimates that among full-time, year-round workers, African American workers were 14 percent less likely than white workers to have any type of retirement plan through their employer.15Fewer workplace benefits make it harder for African Americans to save, since they face higher costs and less help in preparing for retirement than their white counterparts. Not only do African Americans work for less pay with fewer benefits, they also face much greater job instability than whites. African Americans often work in occupations and industries that are economically less stable, such as retail services and parts of the health care sector including home health aides and nursing home workers. Moreover, African Americans tend to feel the fallout from a recession more intensely than do whites, as discussed below, and they then tend to be out of a job longer than other unemployed workers. (see Figure 6) African Americans’ employment fluctuates more than it does for whites. The employed share of prime-age African American workers fell by 8.3 percentage points from 75 percent just before the Great Recession started in September 2007 to a low of 66.7 percent in October 2011. (see Figure 5) In comparison, the respective share of white workers dropped by only 4.5 percentage points, from 81 percent in November 2007 to 76.5 percent in July 2010. Moreover, jobs for African Americans tend to disappear sooner when the economy sours and come back later when the economy improves—a phenomenon often described as “last hired, first fired.” The decline in prime-age employment rates associated with the Great Recession started two months sooner for African Americans than whites and lasted 15 months longer than it did for white workers. (see Figure 5) Unemployed African American workers look longer for a new job than whites. From September 2018 to September 2019, the average length of unemployment for unemployed African American workers was 25.5 weeks, compared with only 20.8 weeks for unemployed white workers. (see Figure 6)

Only a FJG can eliminate the racial employment gap. Paul et al 18. Mark Paul, William Darity Jr, Darrick Hamilton, and Khaing Zaw (postdoctoral associate at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University, Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics, associate professor of economics and urban policy at the Milano School of International Affairs, research associate at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University). “A Path to Ending Poverty by Way of Ending Unemployment: A Federal Job Guarantee.” Russell Sage Foundation. 2018. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.7758/rsf.2018.4.3.03.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3Af5fbc93ee31a461a c6dfd4c59d7b63aa

), nonpoverty wages need to be an essential component of reducing poverty. Furthermore, the costs associated with unemployment go far beyond poverty. The nature of the harms from unemployment or are well documented. In addition to inflicting lasting damage on an individual’s labor market prospects, unemployment is associated with increased rates of physical and mental illness, alcohol and drug abuse, child and spouse abuse, failed relationships, suicide and attempted suicide, and a host of other personal and social ills (Goldsmith, Veum, and Darity 1997; Darity 2003). Unemployment does not affect all groups equally; it varies greatly by race, as demonstrated in figure 2. Historical data indicate that unemployment rates for black workers are consistently twice those of white workers. This gap persists among groups with more education as well, with recent black college graduate unemployment at 9.4 percent, versus 3.7 percent among their white counterparts in 2016 (Bivens 2016). In fact, the differential is so pronounced that there are many months when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that blacks with some college education have a higher unemployment rate than whites who never finished high school. Even when black students complete degrees in a statistics, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) field, ostensibly fields in high demand by the labor market, they still experience markedly higher rates of unemployment. They also are more likely to end up in jobs that do not require a STEM degree (Jones and Schmitt 2014). Since 1972, unemployment has averaged double digits for black workers but has never fallen below 7 percent—a level reached only during times of economic crisis—for white workers. But the ills of unemployment and poverty can be resolved by direct government action. In his 1944 State of the Union address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced what he called an Economic Bill of Rights. The first “article” was a right to employment. In the absence of the provision of adequate opportunities for work by the private sector, demonstrated by the jobs gap in figure 1, Roosevelt envisioned the maintenance of a public-sector option for employment for all. However, Roosevelt’s bold aim has not been realized, even if its ambition is embodied in the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978. This is unfortunate because a well-designed federal job guarantee (FJG) program would be a direct route to full employment and simultaneously eliminate involuntary unemployment and poverty in America.5 Such a program could be informed by and modeled after Great Depression–era projects such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), as well as ’s Jefes y Jefas and ’s National Rural Employment Guarantee (for Argentina, see Tcherneva and Wray 2005; for India, see Muralidharan, Niehaus, and Sukjtankar 2017). Any American wanting a job, at any time, would be able to obtain one through the public employment program. The FJG would reach persons in the workforce who are subject to persistent exclusion from work, ensuring their capacity to secure employment. Groups continuously subjected to higher odds of joblessness, including exoffenders, recent military veterans, and racial ethnic groups who experience discrimination, would be assured decent work at nonpoverty wages (Schmitt and Warner 2010; Loughran 2014; Darity 2003).6 These are the same groups subject to stubbornly high rates of poverty, in part because of their weaker job prospects (Proctor, Semega, and Kollar 2016; Western and Pettit 2010). The persistent racial unemployment gap, as discussed, would effectively be eliminated by the FJG. By establishing a condition whereby the lowest paid job in the FJG program offers nonpoverty wages and benefits, including health insurance for the worker and their family, the federal job guarantee would set a new economy-wide floor on the level of compensation that the private sector would need to offer to attract workers. Minimum wage laws and living wage standards are effective only to the extent that employees actually have jobs. A FJG, on the other hand, would combine an assurance of employment with an assurance of decent compensation. The FJG also will function as an automatic stabilizer, its numbers of participants expanding during economic downturns and contracting during more prosperous times. Other articles in this double issue make important contributions on how best to improve and expand the existing system of social insurance. Our proposal offers a bold, yet historically grounded, alternative. The FJG fundamentally would alter the nature of poverty and the structure of the labor market by mandating a full employment economy achieved by the government taking the function of direct job creation. Some of the authors have been advocates of a FJG for several years (Darity 2010, 2012; Darity and Hamilton 2012), but a number of issues and criticisms have been advanced about the FJG policy. Our objective is to provide a comprehensive design for a FJG that explicitly addresses these central criticisms and to further explore the impact of a FJG on poverty. Contention 2: Economy

Our economic outlook improved by nearly 4 percentage points and is still 4.3%, now is not the time to reduce our but increase it to prevent a continued growth in poverty. Greg Robb 20, 10-13-2020, (Reporter for Marketwatch) "Recovery from global recession is slowing, and governments should not withdraw their support, IMF says," MarketWatch, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/recovery-from-global-recession-is-slowing-and-governments- should-not-withdraw-their-support-imf-says-2020-10-13?mod=home-page, Accessed: 10/13/20, IM

The global economic recession is turning out to be less severe than feared but governments should not withdraw their fiscal stimulus because the path ahead is perilous, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday. “While the global economy is coming back, the ascent will likely be long, uneven, and uncertain,” the international financial agency said, in its latest World Economic Outlook. Since the summer, prospects have worsened significantly for some emerging and developing economies where coronavirus infections are rising rapidly. For 2021, the IMF cut its global economic forecast for 2021 to a 5.2% growth rate from the prior 5.4% growth rate. For 2022 and beyond, the global economy is expected to “moderate significantly” starting in 2022, the IMF said. “Both advanced and emerging market economies are likely to register significant losses of output relative to their pre-pandemic forecasts,” said IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath, in a statement accompanying the report. “Preventing further setbacks will require that policy support is not prematurely withdrawn,” said Gopinath. “Recovery is not assured while the pandemic continues to spread.” This year’s recession — the worst since the Great Depression — will be less severe than expected only four months ago, the IMF said. Global output is forecast to fall at a negative 4.4% rate. That’s an improvement from the 4.9% contraction forecast in June. The deep recession will be a major setback to global efforts to relieve poverty. This year, the incidence of extreme poverty will rise for the first time in two decades, Gopinath said. Advanced economies have been able to weather the storm given their ability to borrow and spend. The IMF lifted the U.S. growth outlook for 2020 to negative 4.3%, an improvement of 3.7% from an earlier prediction.

A Federal Jobs Guarantee Would Help with Recovery After COVID and Help Mitigate Future Inequity:

Blackwell and Hamilton 20. Angela Glover Blackwell and Darrick Hamilton (managing director and Angela Glover Blackwell is the founder-in-residence at PolicyLink, a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity, associate professor of economics and urban policy at the Milano School of International Affairs). “Will We Face Depression-Era Job Losses? Let’s Not Find Out.” NY Times. May 9 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/opinion/federal-jobs-guarantee-coronavirus.html On Friday, the Labor Department announced that over 20.5 million Americans lost their jobs in April, bringing the unemployment rate to 14.7 percent. This level of devastation has not been reached since the Great Depression. With more than one in four companies shuttered to minimize the pandemic’s death toll and at least 30 million workers seeking unemployment benefits, we are in the throes of an unprecedented jobs crisis. Just like the health crisis, economic fallout is hitting black and brown communities particularly hard. Far more black, Latinx, and Native American households are financially impacted or severely harmed by the coronavirus than white households. People of color make up an outsized share of the essential workers — grocery store clerks, bus drivers, janitors and home care workers — who risk exposure to the virus while earning low wages with few benefits. While Congress has taken some important steps to provide relief, more must be done to keep people safe, prevent job losses and maintain incomes. We face a recession with the potential for Depression-era job losses, and we know from experience that black and brown workers bear the greatest risk of long-term economic setbacks. To ensure an inclusive recovery and a more resilient future, Congress needs to enact a federal job guarantee: a public option for a job with living wages and full benefits on projects that meet long-neglected community needs. This idea is not new. The Humphrey-Hawkins Act — introduced in the 1970s by Senator Hubert Humphrey, a Democrat from Minnesota, and Representative Augustus Hawkins, a Democrat from California — proposed employment guarantees. The original bill allowed citizens to sue the government if they couldn’t find a job. A version of federal job protections has been percolating for years. In 2018, three Democratic senators — of New York, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Bernie Sanders of Vermont — approved of the idea. Hundreds of scholars, leaders and organizations working for racial, economic and environmental justice have signed on to a Jobs for All pledge calling for a federal guarantee. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story The coronavirus exposes the extreme vulnerability of a system that actively produces inequality. A job guarantee is a powerful solution that would not only address urgent needs but also bend our economy toward racial and economic justice. As Pavlina Tcherneva, an economist at Bard College, described, some of these guaranteed jobs could be in disaster preparation and monitoring. We could hire workers to conduct the community-based testing, monitoring and contract tracing necessary to contain the virus and safely reopen the economy. Workers would be equipped with proper personal protective equipment, and could have access to child care provided through the program. Employment (rather than unemployment) offices across the country could identify and fill shortages of ventilators and masks. The program would be funded by the federal government and administered locally, with community input to identify projects that address long-term physical and care infrastructure needs. Communities could implement energy efficiency retrofits and environmental restoration efforts to fight climate change. They could hire teacher’s assistants, child care providers and elder care aides to support our youth and seniors. And they could remediate brownfields and create new public art. States and cities could also implement larger-scale projects, for example laying municipal broadband networks that plug disconnected communities into the modern economy — a divide made visible as public schools scrambled to implement distance learning. By ensuring that everyone can have not just any job, but a good job with dignified wages, benefits, health care, safe working conditions and full worker rights, a job guarantee would deliver long-needed worker reforms. It would tackle poverty by providing a viable alternative for the 40 percent of workers who earn less than $15 per hour. And it would reduce racial employment disparities by guaranteeing good jobs for everyone, including black, Latinx and Native American workers who face hiring discrimination and are disproportionately relegated to low-wage jobs. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story A federal commitment to universal employment has deep roots in the New Deal and the civil rights movement. The Works Progress Administration employed 8.5 million people over eight years, building infrastructure that supported and powered the nation over the next century. In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for an Economic Bill of Rights, beginning with the right to employment. Martin Luther King, Jr., pushed for guaranteed jobs in his final years and Coretta Scott King led a grass-roots movement championing it. An updated version of Roosevelt’s vision would increase bargaining power and expand the social safety net for all workers. By hiring workers at the beginning of a downturn, a permanent job guarantee would operate as an automatic stabilizer in perpetuity, maintaining consumer spending and protecting us from recessions — making our economy more resilient as well as more inclusive. This time last year, no one would have predicted that a global pandemic would bring us to the brink of economic collapse. But we can predict with certainty that Covid-19 will not be our last economic shock. A job guarantee can mitigate this harm and usher in a more just and equitable economy.

FJG provides a permanent solution to poverty through both a wage minimum and benefit package. Paul et al, 18. Mark Paul, William Darity Jr, and Darrick Hamilton (Postdoctoral Associate at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University), Darity, William (the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African-American Studies and Economics and the Director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University), and Hamilton, Derrick (director of the doctoral program in public and urban policy, and jointly appointed as an associate professor of economics and urban policy at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy and the Department of Economics, the New School for Social Research at the New School in New York). “The Federal Job Guarantee - A Policy to Achieve Permanent Full Employment.” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. March 9 2018. https://www.cbpp.org/research/full-employment/the-federal-job- guarantee-a-policy-to-achieve-permanent-full-employment The federal job guarantee would provide a job, at non-poverty wages, for all citizens above the age of 18 that sought one.[17] The minimum wage rate in the program is $11.83 an hour, equivalent to $24,600 per year for full-time workers, which is the current poverty line for a family of four. This rate would be indexed to inflation, ensuring that workers’ purchasing power is maintained over time.[18] The program would incorporate wage variation based on time and performance in the program, a worker’s previous experience, education, and region of residence; thus, we estimate a mean annual wage for all employees at approximately $32,500.[19] The permanent establishment of the NIEC would eliminate persistent involuntary unemployment in the economy, ensuring that the United States lives up to the unfunded mandate to achieve and maintain full employment as outlined in the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978. But we know that a job is not sufficient for workers to live a life of decency and guard against poverty. To provide an adequate living for workers and keep them and their families financially stable, workers will receive a benefits package in addition to a non-poverty wage as part of their compensation.[20] At this time, we estimate additional expenditures of $10,000 per full-time worker per year to provide adequate health insurance and benefits. Since workers would be public employees, the insurance would be comparable to current health insurance plans offered to civil servants, including members of Congress.[21] Other fringe benefits will also be provided to workers, including paid family and sick leave and one-week paid vacation per three months worked.

Poverty harms individuals throughout their lives Holzer et al 07 Harry J Holzer, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, Greg J Duncan, and Jens Ludwig (professor of economics at Michigan State University (1983–2000), a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research). “The Economic Costs of Poverty.” Center for American Progress. Jan 24 2007. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2007/01/24/2450/the-economic-costs-of- poverty/

Most arguments for reducing poverty in the U.S., especially among children, rest on a moral case for doing so—one that emphasizes the unfairness of child poverty, and how it runs counter to our national creed of equal opportunity for all. But there is also an economic case for reducing child poverty. When children grow up in poverty, they are somewhat more likely than non-poor children to have low earnings as adults, which in turn reflects lower workforce productivity. They are also somewhat more likely to engage in crime (though that’s not the case for the vast majority) and to have poor health later in life. Their reduced productive activity generates a direct loss of goods and services to the U.S. economy. What’s more, any crime in which they engage imposes large monetary and other personal costs on their victims, as well as the costs to the taxpayer of administering our huge criminal justice system. And their poor health generates illness and early mortality which not only require large healthcare expenditures, but also impede productivity and ultimately reduce their quality and quantity of life. In this paper, we review a range of rigorous research studies that estimate the average statistical relationships between children growing up in poverty and their earnings, propensity to commit crime, and quality of health later in life. We also review estimates of the costs that crime and poor health per person impose on the economy. Then we aggregate all of these average costs per poor child across the total number of children growing up in poverty in the U.S. to estimate the aggregate costs of child poverty to the U.S. economy. We had to make a number of critical assumptions about how to define and measure poverty, what level of income to use as a non-poverty benchmark, and which effects are really caused by growing up in poverty and not simply correlated with it. Wherever possible, we made conservative assumptions, in order to generate lower-bound estimates. The upshot: Our results suggest that the costs to the U.S. associated with childhood poverty total about $500B per year, or the equivalent of nearly 4 percent of GDP. More specifically, we estimate that childhood poverty each year: Reduces productivity and economic output by about 1.3 percent of GDP Raises the costs of crime by 1.3 percent of GDP Raises health expenditures and reduces the value of health by 1.2 percent of GDP. If anything, these estimates almost certainly understate the true costs of poverty to the U.S. economy. For one thing, they omit the costs associated with poor adults who did not grow up poor as children. They ignore all other costs that poverty might impose on the nation besides those associated with low productivity, crime, and health—such as environmental costs and much of the suffering of the poor themselves. What does all of this imply for public policy? The high cost of childhood poverty to the U.S. suggests that investing significant resources in poverty reduction might be more cost-effective over time than we previously thought. Of course, determining the effectiveness of various policies requires careful evaluation research in a variety of areas. Our analysis did not venture into the effectiveness of specific anti-poverty policies, but our conclusions point unmistakably to several clear options, among them: Universal pre-kindergarten programs Various elementary and secondary school reforms Expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and other income supports for the working poor Job training for poor adults Higher minimum wages and more collective bargaining Low-income neighborhood revitalization and housing mobility Marriage promotion and faith-based initiatives Given the strong evidence of the effectiveness of some of these programs, such as high-quality pre-kindergarten and the Earned Income Tax Credit, investments through these mechanisms seem particularly warranted. At a minimum, the costs of poverty imply that we should work hard to identify cost-effective strategies of poverty remediation and that we should not hesitate to invest significant resources when these strategies are identified. In the meantime, we should also experiment with and evaluate a wide range of promising efforts.

Negative 1NC

I negate, Resolved: The United States ought to provide a federal jobs guarantee. Definitions Federal Jobs Guarantee: Bhandari 19, Ryan (former senior policy advisor for Third Way). “What Is the “Federal Jobs Guarantee” and What Are People Saying About It?” Third Way. March 25 2019. https://www.thirdway.org/memo/what-is-the-federal-jobs-guarantee-and-what-are-people-saying- about-it

A federal jobs guarantee is as simple as it sounds on the surface: everyone in the country will be guaranteed a job by the US government should they desire one. There are two versions right now gaining attention. One plan is written by academics Mark Paul, Sandy Darity, and Darrick Hamilton. The other was written by Pavlina Tcherneva. In general, these plans promise: Guaranteed jobs in infrastructure repair, ecological restoration, caregiving, and community development projects. Benefits like health insurance, paid sick leave/vacation, and retirement plans. Control for state and local governments that will decide which kinds of jobs to create. A reduced uptake of welfare programs and unemployment insurance as well as decreased criminal justice costs. The key difference between the two plans is the minimum wage for the new jobs. The Tcherneva plan establishes a $15 minimum wage and the Paul et al. plan calls for an $11.80 minimum wage for all federally guaranteed jobs. Yet, both have the same underlying goal: Permanently solve the problem of involuntary unemployment by making the federal government the employer of last resort

Value/Criterion Government policies directly impact the well-being of citizens, and which is the primary value of today’s debate round. Dumont 18, (Marie, 3-20-2018, Research assistant at the Library of Parliament for Canada)"Well-being in Public Policy: Should Governments Worry about Happiness?," HillNotes, https://hillnotes.ca/2018/03/20/well-being-in-public-policy-should-governments-worry-about- happiness/

Research is increasingly showing a link between government policies and well-being. The quality of government policies regarding poverty and inequality, and environmental protection are an important factor in improving a country’s well-being. In 2015, world leaders adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda to promote the adoption of government policies that correlate with improving happiness and well-being. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) also acknowledges that “there is more to life than the cold numbers of GDP and economic statistics”. The organization says that public policy should be informed by statistics that reflect quality of life factors including trust, voter turnout, unemployment and environmental degradation..

This is achieved through the criterion of reducing poverty. Polly Toynbee, 7-29-2005, (Writer for The Guardian) "Review: The Impact of Inequality by Richard G Wilkinson," Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jul/30/highereducation.news1 Accessed: 8/9/20, IM

People, says Wilkinson, are the same. Social status and respect matter beyond anything, and the psychological damage done by being at the bottom is crippling. A survey of Whitehall civil servants found junior ranks were three times more likely to die in a year than seniors, with a fine sliding gradation from top to bottom according to status. If one office was found to be killing three times more than another next door, it would be evacuated instantly. Yet social environment may matter almost as much as asbestos. Homicide rates (and other crimes) track a country's level of inequality, not its overall wealth. The fairest countries have the highest levels of trust and social capital. The American states that have the more equal income distribution also have most social trust: New Hampshire, the most equal, is least likely to agree that "most people would try to take advantage of you if they got the chance". Wilkinson's message is that social environment can be more toxic than any pollutant. Low status and lack of control over one's life is a destroyer of human health and happiness. The wealth gap causes few to vote or participate in anything in a world of fear, conflict and hostility. It is not primarily five-a-day fruit and veg or obesity that need targeting, but social injustice itself. Infant mortality is mainly a result of low-birth weight babies, something the government has tried hard to improve. Wilkinson shows that these days small premature babies are not caused by bad diet: even poor nutrition by British standards will rarely harm a fetus. It is stress in pregnancy that does it, high cortisol levels which affect the fetus for life - and poorer mothers are more depressed, with less social support. Psyche matters more than vitamins, all through life. An orphanage in hungry post-war Germany found children on the same diet were found to have grown most under the kindest matron and least under the unkindest matron. Poverty in rich nations is not a number or the absence of a particular necessity. A poor vicar may bring up children well on lentils and respect. But for most people respect is measured in money. Low pay tells people that their labour and they themselves are worth little. Poverty is not, as the government imagines, a line to pull people over but it is a position on a line. If it tilts too sharply upwards, the pain of those at the bottom can be measured in hard statistics.

Contention 1: Automation Automation is the biggest threat to employment stability and could risk the entirety the majority of jobs in the United States Darrell M. West 18, (Vice President and Director, Governance Studies Senior Fellow of the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings) 4-18-2018, "Will robots and AI take your job? The economic and political consequences of automation," Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2018/04/18/will-robots-and-ai-take-your-job-the-economic- and-political-consequences-of-automation/ Accessed: 10/12/20, IM

Yet amid these possible benefits, there is widespread fear that robots and AI will take jobs and throw millions of people into poverty. A Pew Research Center study asked 1,896 experts about the impact of emerging technologies and found “half of these experts (48 percent) envision a future in which robots and digital agents [will] have displaced significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers—with many expressing concern that this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order.”[3] These fears have been echoed by detailed analyses showing anywhere from a 14 to 54 percent automation impact on jobs. For example, a Bruegel analysis found that “54% of EU jobs [are] at risk of computerization.”[4] Using European data, they argue that job losses are likely to be significant and people should prepare for large-scale disruption. Meanwhile, Oxford University researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne claim that technology will transform many sectors of life. They studied 702 occupational groupings and found that “47 percent of U.S. workers have a high probability of seeing their jobs automated over the next 20 years.”[5] A McKinsey Global Institute analysis of 750 jobs concluded that “45% of paid activities could be automated using ‘currently demonstrated technologies’ and . . . 60% of occupations could have 30% or more of their processes automated.”[6] A more recent McKinsey report, “Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained,” found that 30 percent of “work activities” could be automated by 2030 and up to 375 million workers worldwide could be affected by emerging technologies.[7] Researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) focused on “tasks” as opposed to “jobs” and found fewer job losses. Using task-related data from 32 OECD countries, they estimated that 14 percent of jobs are highly automatable and another 32 have a significant risk of automation. Although their job loss estimates are below those of other experts, they concluded that “low qualified workers are likely to bear the brunt of the adjustment costs as the automatibility of their jobs is higher compared to highly qualified workers.”[8]

Pushing for higher wages and benefits through a jobs guarantee results in a quicker move towards automation. The result is an increasing number of individuals reliant on the job guarantee and without the skills to move up. Jack Karsten and Darrell M. West 15, 9-30-2015, "Rising minimum wages make automation more cost-effective," Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2015/09/30/rising-minimum- wages-make-automation-more-cost-effective/ Accessed: 10/12/20, IM

The movement pushing for a $15 per hour minimum wage has succeeded in several large cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. These minimum wage increases coincide with falling prices for computers that can replace human labor in some low-skill jobs. A higher minimum wage changes cost considerations for businesses seeking to automate more of their operations. Increasingly, low-skill workers will not only have to compete with each other for jobs at higher wages, but also with computers. Staying competitive in a changing job market will require workers to specialize in tasks that computers cannot easily perform. TWO TRENDS CONVERGE The federal minimum wage, currently set at $7.25 per hour, is not tied to inflation, so Congress must periodically raise it to maintain its value. At the state level, only 10 states have minimum wages that increase annually with the cost of living; a further five states and the District of Columbia will introduce annual increases in the future. These annual increases forgo the need for large adjustments to the minimum wage at irregular intervals. In addition to benefiting workers, it would allow employers to slowly adjust to wage increases. If the price of labor rises too quickly, businesses have a bigger incentive to replace human labor with automation technology. Automation involves the substitution of machines for human labor. Historically, automation has reduced or eliminated some job categories while simultaneously creating new ones. During the Industrial Revolution, new farming machines reduced the need for agricultural labor just as factory jobs were opening up in cities. Likewise, the spread of personal computers, the Internet, and smartphones have greatly expanded the number of jobs available in the service sector. As computer functionality improves and computer prices fall, the labor market is bound to undergo further changes. The food service industry in particular is at the center of both the fight for a higher minimum wage and the introduction of automation technologies. For example, employee scheduling software can match staffing levels with high and low customer demand. Tablet computers placed at tables allow customers to order meals and pay for them without the intervention of a waiter. In the same way, self-service kiosks can replace cashiers at fast food restaurants, and smartphone apps enable customers to order and pay before arriving. Computers are changing food service just as they have for many other industries. UPGRADING WORKFORCE SKILLS As computers replace humans for some minimum wage jobs, it will force displaced workers to upgrade their skills in order to stay competitive. Knowing how to manipulate computers in a work environment will become an increasingly important skill for most workers. In addition, workers will need to specialize in areas where humans excel relative to computers, such as interpersonal skills. To acquire new these new skills, minimum-wage workers will need access to more education and training programs. These second-order effects of automation and skills demand must be taken into account by lawmakers considering a minimum wage hike. Rising wages make computers cost- effective for an increasing number of low-skill tasks. Displaced workers will have to learn additional skills that reflect a work environment that relies on more computers. Enacting automatic increases to the minimum wage would gradually change the cost of labor relative to computers, giving both workers and employers more time to adjust. Additionally, lawmakers should pair minimum wage increases with training programs that upgrade the skills of workers whose jobs are at risk of automation. The compounding effects of automation and the minimum wage will require a combination of solutions.

Contention 2: Universal Basic Income Universal Basic Income is better for those facing poverty. It is guaranteed, does not suffer from government mismanagement, and does not condition aid on employment. Ravallion 19, Martin. (Chari of Economics at Georgetown University and former director of the World Bank’s Development Research Group) "Guaranteed employment or guaranteed income?." World Development 115 (2019): 209-221. Accessed: 10/13/20, IM

A “right to work” policy implemented through public employment can seem an attractive option when poor people face risky environments, high unemployment rates, the reliable information for targeting is limited, and there is much useful work to do in poor areas. Realizing that potential is another matter. The self-targeting feature is plausible and consistent with the evidence. But it is far from obvious that this will be the best way to reduce poverty—taking freedom from poverty to be the overarching right—once one considers all the costs involved. These include implementation costs, pecuniary costs to the participants in the form of forgone earnings (which can exist even for underemployed workers) and the welfare loss from the work requirement relative to unconditional transfers. The paper has pointed to evidence for India suggesting that the country’s Employment Guarantee Schemes have been less cost effective in reducing current poverty through the earnings gains to workers than one would expect from even untargeted transfers, as in a UBI. This calculation could switch in favor of workfare schemes if they can produce assets of value (directly or indirectly) to poor people, though the evidence is mixed on this aspect of the schemes so far in India. The Indian experience also suggests diverse performance across states of its Employment Guarantee Schemes. It is worrying that the schemes tend to work less well in poorer states, where they are probably needed more. Arguably that is not too surprising, as the same factors that make a place poor impede efforts to change. Local rationing of the work opportunities provided by these scheme in poor areas can readily arise from the existence of (often latent) local administrative costs in implementation and from the partial means used by the center to fight local corruption. The main concern with rationing is not that it undermines pro-poor targeting; indeed, that is not implied by the model of local corruption used here, and nor is it consistent with the evidence for India. But rationing undermines the gains to poor people from the employment guarantee, including its insurance benefits. Scaling up may well help; indeed, with local administrative costs, the marginal rationing rate will tend to be lower than the average rate, and that is consistent with the cross-state evidence for India. Anti-corruption efforts and administrative reforms from the center can have ambiguous effects on the extent to which RTW can be achieved in practice. Raising the expected marginal cost of corruption facing local officials is likely to reduce the extent to which employment is available to those who need it. Cutting local administrative costs can help, but when this is achieved within a reform that also raises the marginal cost of corruption facing local officials (such as by making record-keeping and reporting more transparent as well as easier) there may be little net gain to workers in terms of assuring their RTW. Direct cash transfers are now a viable policy option and their use is expanding rapidly. There is much interest, and debate, about this option for India. A key question is whether the transfers should be finely targeted to observationally-poor people. The ability of a government to do so effectively will also vary from one setting to another, but in many cases the information constraint alone can entail that many poor people are not reached. Even with good information, fine targeting has costs, such as the disincentives created by high marginal tax rates. Finely targeted social policies that focus on avoiding leakage to the nonpoor rarely employ the kind of information needed to be very effective against poverty, are often based on an incomplete accounting of the costs incurred (not least by poor people), and often end up excluding many who are in real need. A rights- based perspective points to the advantages of a UBI in poor places. While this is getting much attention these days as a social policy option in rich countries, it may well make sense—possibly more sense—in places with poor information, weak capabilities for targeting, and a high poverty rate. Financing is key of course. There are concerns that the money will come from other public spending benefiting poor people although there are clearly other options. Taxes on readily-identified rich citizens, or eligibility restrictions, may be used to implement a fiscally-viable UBI with low exclusion errors. The final outcome for poverty will of course depend on many factors, including the information available for identifying poor people and the feasible means of financing, including the scope for identifying and taxing rich people.

A UBI would help to fight not only upcoming automation, but the automation happening now due to the pandemic. Only the negative can both resolve the issues of unemployment now and in the future. Frederick Kuo 20, (writer for Quartz, the San Francisco Examiner, New Statesman, Citymetric, Asia Times) 5-8-2020, "COVID-19 is accelerating the pace of automation and the need for UBI," Big Think, https://bigthink.com/coronavirus/universal-basic-income-coronavirus, Accessed: 10/13/20, IM As the mobility of human beings grinds to a halt due to public health directives and fears of infection, our need for food, resources and social connection has forced us to increasingly rely on technology to fill urgent gaps. In the United States, Amazon is seizing this opportunity to further entrench its domination, while in , robots are being deployed to serve those in quarantine. In a world where fear of contact with other humans has become pervasive, businesses that can adapt quickly and significantly automate their supply lines and cut points of human contact stand to thrive in this new market. Whereas before this crisis, the need for automation was mainly driven by the desire for increased profits and improved efficiency, the momentous shift in public consciousness today regarding simple human contact may make automation almost a necessity for many businesses to survive. When humans trust a robot to handle or deliver their food or goods more than they trust another human, or when crowded workplaces present public health hazards, jobs for humans will be unceremoniously eliminated. Given existing technologies, experts have estimated 36 million jobs may be vulnerable, ranging from trucking and delivery to food service and repetitive white collar jobs, the labor market may face a significant restructure driven by new technology and a radically altered market for those technologies. In a recent survey conducted by auditing firm Ernst & Young, more than half of company bosses throughout 45 countries had begun implementing existing plans to fast track automation. The crisis of unemployment has become real for tens of millions locked down around the world. Although this phase is likely to be temporary with normality expected to return by the third quarter, the process of entrenching automation in our daily lives will be radically pushed forward. This crisis has compacted the timeline of a gradual acceptance of an automated future from years into months. In Seattle, Amazon has pioneered Amazon Go, a small grocery that relies on cameras and sensors to charge customers for what they buy instead of a checkout line. With Amazon already in control of a major grocery chain, Whole Foods, one could imagine that this little, fully automated store could serve as a template for a nationwide expansion of this technology, thus reducing the once-vital role of the cashier nearly overnight. Similar rollouts of automation models will likely follow in the coming years, affecting warehouse employees, delivery people, food service personnel and more. In early 2019, Andrew Yang began gaining news coverage regarding the central theme of his presidential campaign: $1,000 a month in universal basic income (UBI) dispersed to every American. His primary argument for the necessity of this safety net rested on the belief that the coming age of automation was about to inundate vast scores of our current jobs with a shrinking percentage of elite tech corporations gobbling up more and more of the profit. When Yang first introduced his vision, it seemed to belong to a remote dystopian future with little relevance to the booming economy and low unemployment figures that was the reality until only weeks ago. On the right, he was lambasted as a communist seeking to turn American citizens into dependents to the state. On the left, his ideas were dismissed as other Democratic hopefuls touted the Green New Deal and job programs. Fast forward to today and Andrew Yang's UBI theory has moved straight into the forefront. Trump, perhaps cognizant that the "Yang Gang" pulled a great deal of support from his own supporters, quickly recognized the popularity of his ideas and the need to provide supplemental income to Americans as shelter-in-place directives began to take hold throughout the country. The massive $2 trillion coronavirus emergency stimulus will provide every American earning $75,000 or less, regardless of current employment, a check of $1,200 per person and $500 per child for the duration of the crisis. There has been little debate over the necessity of this measure because it has proven to be widely popular to the public, regardless of political standing. It lifts some of the immediate and pressing need to work and helps take some of the edge off from isolating at home, thus contributing to a quicker resolution of this health crisis by sending fewer people out into the streets. Although the stimulus package is a stopgap measure to deal with this crisis, its absolute necessity during this crisis has validated Yang's prophetic vision of a dystopian future where work no longer becomes possible for huge swathes of the American people. The reality is that the after effects of this crisis will be felt for at least months after the pandemic ends. There is little security for either the business owners or employees of food service businesses, bars, hair and nail salons and essentially any business that requires large crowds of people to gather and interact. To the initial detractors of UBI who argued that the program would breed laziness and a welfare state, the reality is that for most workers thrown into the sea of uncertainty, receiving a stimulus check will provide a small lifeline but will ultimately be of little solace to individuals who are accustomed to earning far more and who derive a sense of pride and satisfaction from their jobs. For most of those impacted by loss of employment, supplemental income in the form of a UBI helps take the edge off but it is ultimately no replacement for having a job or business. Although the pandemic and the stimulus check is temporary, this crisis has ushered in a glimpse of what a dystopian future would look like as a rapidly advancing fourth industrial revolution inevitably causes severe disruption in our economy and labor structure. Automation and artificial intelligence are coming and will significantly alter the way we work, shop, eat and socialize. As society experiences the disruptive force of technology and draws on our collective experiences fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, UBI may become a permanent fixture of our political economy as well.