Seminars

Harry Hopkins’ career as a social worker from 1915 to 1945 was laser focused on providing jobs for the able-bodied unemployed, first in New York City, then in New York State, and then in the nation. He believed that the right to work for wages was a human right and that the government, at all levels, had the responsibility to ensure that every American who wanted to work had a job. His career reached a peak during the Great Depression when, as President Franklin Roosevelt’s federal relief administrator, he created and ran innovative programs to employ millions of Americans impoverished due to the Depression. Hopkins spent a lot of other people’s tax money administering jobs programs such as the TERA, FERA, CWA, and WPA. He was not thinking about economic policy options or about the best way to fund these agencies, but about the government’s obligation to its citizens. He knew that government cash relief--the dole--was less expensive to administer than his job programs, but he also knew that the dole stigmatized workers and sapped their pride. His proposal for a permanent federal job assurance corporation in 1935 was meant to ensure that all workers would have the dignity of working at a job to support themselves and their families. During the 1930s, in the depths of the Great Depression, Hopkins’ primary goal was not necessarily to help with economic recovery but to help people survive the depression. He got jobs out fast and targeted those most in need. He refused to wait for long-term, top-heavy projects funded by deficit spending, to bring about benefits eventually—soon. These projects were expensive and took time to get going. Meanwhile, people remained destitute. While there may be benefits for the economy, in the long run, Hopkins argued, “People don’t eat in the long run, they eat every day.” The right to work was guaranteed in President Franklin Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights in 1944 because access to adequate wages allows the worker access to economic and social entitlements. For Hopkins, it was simple: “Full employment must and can be attained within the framework of our traditional democratic processes.”

Poverty in America fell sharply after World War II, but since the mid-1970s the poverty rate has essentially been flat. During the last three decades, a variety of initiatives—a large scale, random assignment, demonstration project in Milwaukee (the New Hope Project), followed by evaluations of a series of “policy packages” by the independent Urban Institute—illustrate how federal policy reform could cut poverty by 50% or more. In 2024, the Community Advocates Public Policy Institute commissioned the Urban Institute to model a more robust, work-based, “policy package” designed to drive down poverty to a residual level by reducing unemployment; increasing workers’ earnings as well as the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and affordable childcare; and raising the minimum benefit for adults with a disability and senior retirees. David Riemer will explain the components of the new “policy package”; summarize the Urban Institute’s findings of its dramatic capacity to drive down poverty to low single digits; and review its costs and savings. Based on his decades of experience in crafting state and federal bills to reduce poverty—several of which are now law—he will also discuss the practical aspects of enacting anti-poverty legislation.

Professor Harvey will discuss the feasibility of implementing a job guarantee at the state or local level in the United States. His discussion will be based on a 2011 paper he wrote for a “Big Ideas for Jobs” conference funded by the Anne E. Casey Foundation and co-sponsored by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at U.C. Berkeley. A copy of the paper will be distributed well in advance of the seminar. While assessing the feasibility of implementing a job guarantee at the state or local level, the issues he will address are also relevant to planning a federal job guarantee. They include: (1) the residency requirements a local job guarantee program should adopt vis a vis commuters and immigrants from other jurisdictions; (2) the number of jobs such a program would ultimately have to create given the strategy’s likely labor market and anti-cyclical effects; (3) the wage policy such a program should adopt; (4) how to estimate both the budgetary cost of such a program and the program’s “net cost,” given the additional savings and revenues it would generate for all three levels of government in the United States (federal, state and local); (5) the difficulties involved in “capturing” those additional savings and revenues to help pay for the program, a problem that would be particularly challenging for a program implemented at the state or local level because most of the additional savings and revenues would be generated at the federal level.

The transition to a green economy offers the prospect of massive job creation, with government incentivizing the shift to renewable energy and sustainability in major sectors such as construction and manufacturing. However, Western economies are largely built on a fossil fuel model and driven by market forces that ignore negative externalities to communities and workers. Vivian Price will discuss the push for a just transition to a green economy and offer a critical examination of several state-level transition efforts and the recent UAW strike. Professor Price will show her short doc, Talking Climate, Talking Union, a film that portrays an international conversation on just transition from the perspective of oil workers.

In the wake of the pandemic, workers across the economy had the most bargaining power they’ve had in decades and demonstrated a demand for better quality jobs. But how have workers harnessed their power in the years since, and what can this and other recent worker struggles tell us about how we must evolve our ideas about collective bargaining and direct action? In this presentation, Smiley and Gupta will explore case studies and theories around collective bargaining in the workforce, focusing heavily on dismantling white supremacy and gender discrimination culture in the labor force and in approaches to building worker power.

Professor Harvey’s seminar presentation will draw on three papers to make a three-point argument about how advocacy of a job guarantee should be framed. The first piece is a short article published in Dollars and Sense shortly after the Soviet Union began to disintegrate during the summer of 2001. The second is an essay published in the Buffalo Law Review in 2004. The third is an unpublished paper originally presented at a 2016 conference at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Shortened versions of each paper with links to the originals will be distributed on request before the Seminar. In the first paper Professor Harvey challenges conventional conceptions of the nature of socialism. In the second he challenges disparaging criticism of international human rights law based on the lack of effective legal mechanisms to enforce it. In the third, he challenges the assumption that the definition of full employment applicable to mandates to pursue its achievement, as set forth in international and domestic law, depends on how leading macroeconomists currently define the term. Based on his arguments on these points, Professor Harvey will suggest guidelines for the design and promotion of job guarantee proposals.

From at least as early as the 1960s to today, the Black unemployment rate has been about twice the white unemployment rate. A large, national, subsidized employment program could break this two-to-one, Black-to-white unemployment rate ratio. A subsidized employment program targeting job creation in communities suffering from persistently high rates of joblessness would improve employment prospects for every-one living in such communities. Algernon Austin will discuss the potential of a federal subsidized employment program to reduce the high joblessness among Black Americans and sketch some design features that would make that program more effective in addressing the travesty of Black joblessness.