[PDF] Direct Federal Job Creation eBook

Author : Steven Attewell
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 33,71 MB
Release : 2018-07-19
Category : History
ISBN : 0812295315

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In People Must Live by Work, Steven Attewell presents the history of an idea—direct job creation—that transformed the role of government in ameliorating unemployment by hiring the unemployed en masse to prevent widespread destitution in economic crises. For ten years, between 1933 and 1943, direct job creation was put into practice, employing more than eight million Americans and making the federal government the largest single employer in the country. Yet in 2008, when the most dramatic economic crisis since the Depression occurred, the idea of direct job creation was nowhere to be found on the list of policies deemed feasible or advisable for government at any level. People Must Live by Work traces the rise and fall of direct job creation policy—how it was put into practice, how it came within a hairbreadth of becoming a permanent feature of American economic and social administration, and why it has been largely forgotten or discounted today. Contrary to more conventional arguments, Attewell reveals that the New Deal ended the Great Depression before the United States entered World War II and its jobs programs continued to influence policy debates over the Employment Act of 1946. He examines the deliberations surrounding the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act that was signed into law in 1978 and demonstrates the ways in which direct job creation played a significant and polarizing role in dividing the economic establishment and the Democratic party in the 1970s. People Must Live by Work not only chronicles the ambition, constraints, and achievements of direct job creation policy in the past but also proposes a framework for understanding its enduring significance and promise for today.

Author : Steven Attewell
Publisher :
Page : 497 pages
File Size : 30,82 MB
Release : 2013
Category :
ISBN : 9781303730740

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At the lowest ebb of the Great Depression, the Federal government broke with centuries of economic orthodoxy to grapple with an economic crisis that had thrown anywhere from a quarter to a third of the American workforce onto the breadlines. For the first time in American history, the government would directly employ the jobless in an effort to bring down national unemployment rates. "Public At Work: Direct Job Creation Policy From the New Deal to the Rise of Reagan" traces the tumultuous and often unexplored history of direct job creation policy, beginning with an exploration of the intellectual and programmatic development of the Works Progress Administration within the New Deal and its impact on the Great Depression, which was far more successful in combating mass unemployment than many historians have recognized. By 1945-6, when debates over full employment consumed the Congress, direct job creation stood at the verge of becoming the foundation of American economic and social welfare policy. "Public At Work" points to intellectual and ideological choices within liberalism as the reason why at the very moment when the Full Employment Bill of 1945 promised to make the U.S a leader in the full employment field, jobs policy was rapidly de-institutionalized and pushed to the margins of policy discourse. Despite this setback, direct job creation survived as an intellectual and policy contender within the War on Poverty task forces where it challenged then-dominant "culture of poverty" theories of poverty - creating a bridge between New Deal liberalism and post-war liberalism. "Public At Work" concludes by demonstrating how direct job creation - through the vehicle of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act - was very much the fulcrum of the crisis of the New Deal order, as the collapse of the Keynesian consensus divided the economic establishment and the Democratic Party at a time of high unemployment and high inflation.

Author : Paul Charles Light
Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 40,74 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780815752660

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In this book-- the first that attempts to establish firm estimates of the shadow work force-- Paul C. Light explores the reasons why the official size of the federal government has remained so small while the shadow of government has grown so large.