Full employment

Many intertwined factors contribute to sustainability in the desert settlements of Birdsville and Bedourie. Taking one factor, the commitment to, and achievement of, full employment for all local residents, this paper draws data from a larger research project ...

In the 1970s, the leader of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and future Prime Minister of Australia, Robert J. Hawke, was an informer of the United States of America. Using diplomatic cables from official archives, this article shows that Hawke gifted information about the Australian Government, the Australian Labor Party and the labour movement, fueling the intelligence gathering efforts of the foreign power. In turn, the relationship influenced the development of Australian policy, including the abandonment of Keynesianism and embrace of neoliberalism. His discreet actions – discussed in detail for the first time – were not unusual among elites in the post-war period. However, he was especially entrenched in the practice. Many people in politics, the bureaucracy and news media were similarly providing useful information. This paper will also show through historiography and memoir that the act of informing by elites began in the 1940s, when the United States became Australia’s key strategic ally.

This essay reconsiders the impact of the neoliberal revolution of the last quarter of the twentieth century on the welfare state. After recalling the emphasis placed on employment security by post-war social reformers, it is argued that the abandonment of full employment commitment, through the dismissal of the stabilisation functions of fiscal and monetary tools, has been the guideline of the neoliberal strategy. Following the crisis of the seventies and with the support of neoclassical theories, policy priorities have shifted towards keeping inflation low, dismantling state intervention and a re-commodification of labour. Since then, the responsability for unemployment has been put onto the individual. Together with the cultural triumph of individualism, the neoliberal offensive has transformed the relationships between citizens and the State, which finds itself unable to accommodate the demands for security and prosperity, constrained as it is by balanced budgets. Social rights, whose pillar was the maintenance of full employment, are the victims of this age, where citizens rights are replaced by contractual relationships contingent on meeting market behavioural criteria.
On the basis of its growing signs of unsustainability, it is suggested that the current neoliberal era, that has reversed the progressive path of ‘the age of rights’, may be at its turning point in the pendular motion between claims for social justice and the property rights of new global business oligarchy.

The macroeconomic agenda known as Keynesianism was highly contentious when it was introduced to Australia during the Second World War. Using a ‘history from below’ approach – correctly understood as a society-wide analysis – this thesis reveals the debates and the participants in the social nexus that considered the work of the British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). It shows that the populous willed a break from the status quo, ranging in favour of socialism to a non-capitalist third way. Support for Keynesianism was isolated to capital and the political right wing, with labour, centrists, the left and far-left strongly opposed. As the war progressed, apathy set in and Keynesianism came to be seen by opponents as either a non-capitalist third way or as the triumph of the possible over the desirable socialist “new order”.

From 1936, Keynes had popularised a new economics based on full employment planning that quickly displaced ‘laissez faire capitalism’ in the minds of economists and policymakers. As war broke out, Keynes submitted a war finance plan for public consideration in the United Kingdom. Essentially, the plan addressed the practical aspects of managing an economy experiencing full employment. It contained measures to reduce wage growth to counter rising inflation, welfare for mothers and children to protect their well-being – but also the population growth essential to future economic growth – and the partial repayment of seized wages at the end of the war that would form the basis of post-war “reconstruction”. The Keynes plan generated interest in Australia which rapidly turned to speculation about its applicability. A fierce debate raged, divided on broad political lines, for two years that would shift public opinion and contribute significantly to the rise of the Curtin government (1941-45). However, once enthusiasm for reconstruction waned, it was this government that brought about post-war Keynesianism.

Inequality is corroding the economic and social foundations of Europe. Europe is not confronting a crisis of public debt but an employment crisis causing increasing inequality and undermining social solidarity. People throughout Europe are suffering from unemployment and precarious living conditions. This is not an inevitable or natural consequence of the economic crisis. It is a situation that has arisen in large part as a consequence of the prevailing approach to employment policies due to a fixation upon supply-side strategies while neglecting the crucial demand-side aspects of employment. The focus on supply-side measures has narrowed the debate on employment policy from both the left and the right, limiting the role of politics to making labour markets more efficient. Neither job creation nor the quality of jobs are part of the debate. Full employment is therefore a crucial step towards challenging the debilitating orthodoxy of the dominant economic governance paradigm.

The paper takes a fresh look at the governance of the most important macroeconomic objectives: price stability and full employment. On the basis of a post-Keynesian market constellations approach, the necessity and institutional requirements of the coordination of macroeconomic policy areas in general and an optimal central bank setting in particular are analysed, and an amelioration of monetary policy of the neo-Keynesian ‘new macroeconomic consensus’ is provided.

There is no doubt that the development of employment and wage in the metal industries 1933-1939 were decisive for the economic and political goals of the Nazi-Regime. The central issue was to integrate metal workers effectively, i.e. without major strikes and declines in productivity, into the whole economic process in order to secure an intensive armament production. How was this objective achieved? Was it possible to keep the purchasing power of workers low enough to achieve a redistribution of production capacities from consumer goods industries to war industries? It is the opinion of the author of this article that the development and application of wage-incentive-systems in combination with the restriction of a rise in the general level of wages was a major instrument in the attempts of the Nazi Regime to make labour in the war economy efficient. It is thus necessary to consider in addition to the general wage and employment situation the system by which wages were paid.

This paper presents the idea of the Job Guarantee (JG), which is a logical extension of the paradigm of a tax-driven fiat currency. The JG involves the government offering a public purpose-oriented job with a fixed hourly wage and job benefits to anyone willing to work. The JG as a bottom-up approach is locally administered but federally funded. As the analytical lens of MMT reveals, a monetarily sovereign government is always able to provide the spending required. Macroeconomically, the JG works as an automatic countercyclical stabilizer and an excellent tool for aggregated demand management, ensuring the economy is continuously operating at full capacity. On top, the JG uses an employed buffer stock approach as a superior means to maintain price stability. Next to its favourable macroeconomic impacts, the JG offers many social benefits, particularly related to continuous employment, working conditions in the private sector, power relations in the labour market and democracy. While...

Abstract: The mission of the International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment (IJEWE) is to provide a forum for the discussion and analysis of the effect that achieving ecological sustainability will have on employment/unemployment and the nature of the workplace. ...

L'articolo costituisce una rapida disamina di una proposta politica per la piena occupazione e la lotta alla povertà, poco nota nel dibattito politico, filosofico ed economico italiano. L'interesse della proposta, sviluppata inizialmente da Hyman Minsky e ripresa in-dipendentemente da diversi economisti in particolare di indirizzo post-keynesiano, sta essenzialmente nell'affrontare congiuntamente lotta alla povertà e perseguimento della piena occupazione, all'interno di un quadro macroeconomico coerente, in cui lo stato abbia il ruolo di " occupatore di ultima istanza ". Presentiamo alcuni dati e osservazioni relativi a una sua possibile implementazione in Italia.

There is a wide agreement on the fact that a large informal economy leaves many individuals without social protection and reduces government's tax revenue and social security contributions. However, it remains an open question what really drives informality, namely ...

Paper presented in 1st MMT international conference, 2017 21-24 September - Universit of Missouri Kansas City

The State as currency monopolist and its capacity/duty to pursue the full employment and price stability can be considered as the MMT key node. This document offers a point of view based on Soft currency economics (W.B. Mosler, 1994) and Mosler Economics/MMT and post-Keynesian literature, comparing the “Employer of last resort” (ELR) proposal (as outlined by Mosler) with some of the most commonly adopted (and normally not coordinated) measures oriented to support employment levels and to intervene on price stability, showing the deeply different structure and the manifest and hidden implications of these approaches with respect to ELR in terms of targets, output, results, costs, political implications. Some organizative issues related with an ELR policy are
mentioned, and the document suggests that the difficulty to put in place such policy (even if this can be considered a fully rational choice) relies in the nature of the State as “nearly rational” entity, as explained by H. A. Simon. The actual Italian institutional architecture embodies a as case study showing a “Triello” between Full employment, Balanced budget, Public deficits, with a figured comparison to the famous movie “The good, the bad and the ugly” (by the italian director S. Leone) towards a solution that fits the public purpose.