| Abstract: |
Over the past decade and a half the ability of the employer-of-last-resort
(ELR) proposal to deliver full employment and price stability has been
discussed at length in the literature. A different issue has received
relatively little attention—namely, the concern that even when the ELR
produces these macroeconomic benefits, it does so by offering "low-paying"
"dead-end" jobs, further denigrating the unemployed. In this context, the
important buffer stock feature of the ELR is misconstrued as a hydraulic
mechanism that prioritizes macroeconomic stability over the program's benefits
to the unemployed. This paper argues that the two objectives are not mutually
exclusive by revisiting Argentina's experience with Plan Jefes and its
subsequent reform. Plan Jefes is the only direct job creation program in the
world specifically modeled after the modern ELR proposal developed in the
United States. With respect to macroeconomic stability, the paper reviews how
it exhibits some of the key stabilizing features of ELR that have been
postulated in the literature, even though it was not designed as an
unconditional job guarantee. Plan Jefes also illustrated that public
employment programs can have a transformative impact on persistent
socioeconomic problems such as poverty and gender disparity. Women-by far the
largest group of program beneficiaries-report key benefits to their
communities, families, children, and (importantly) themselves from
participation in Jefes. Argentina's experience shows that direct job creation
programs that offer employment at a base wage can have the unique capacity to
empower and undermine prevailing structures that produce and reproduce poverty
and gender disparities. Because the latter two problems are multidimensional,
the ELR cannot be treated as a panacea, but rather as an important policy tool
that remedies some of the most entrenched and resilient causes of poverty and
gender inequality. The paper examines survey evidence based on narratives by
female participants in Jefes to assess these potentially transformative
aspects of the ELR proposal. |