The Full Employment Road to Socialism: The Job Guarantee Movement of the 1970s and the Challenge to Capitalism

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Notes

1 Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America: The U.S. Left Since the Second World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 181–8.

2 The relationship between the labor and civil rights movement of the 1930s and 40s – between the drive for working-class democracy and racial emancipation – has been explored by several historians, most recently, Toure Reed, in Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2020), 25–40.

3 Paul Le Blanc, Left Americana: The Radical Heart of US History (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 25–30.

4 “A ‘Tiger by the Toenail’: Origins of the New Working-Class Majority,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2 (Fall 2005), 103, 106–9.

5 Philip Randolph Institute, “Prospectus,” n.d., box 7, folder titled “A. Philip Randolph Institute, Miscellany, 1965–1976,” Rustin papers, Library of Congress; for more on the Freedom Budget, see Philip Randolph Institute, A “Freedom Budget” for all Americans: Budgeting Our Resources 1966–1975 to Achieve “Freedom from Want (New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1966) as well as Paul Le Blanc and Michael Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014).

6 Bernard E. Anderson, “Robert Browne and Full Employment,” Review of Black Political Economy 35 (2008): 93–4.

7 Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20^th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 255–6.

8 “Statement of the National Organization for Women on the Balanced Growth and Full Employment Act of 1976,” in Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Economic Growth and Stabilization of the Joint Economic Committee of the United States, Ninety-Fifth Congress, First Session, September 16, 1977 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978): 35–54, quotation on p. 40.

9 Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 206–21; Nancy MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 136–54, 287–8.

10 Irma Diamond, “The Liberation of Women in a Full Employment Society,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 418 (March 1975): 138–41.

11 Ibid., 140.

12 Ibid., 139–40, 142.

13 Marissa Chappell, “Demanding a New Family Wage: Feminist Consensus in the 1970s Full Employment Campaign,” in Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States, ed. Stephanie Gilmore (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 272.

14 Diamond, “The Liberation of Women,” 142–3.

15 Historian Dorothy Sue Cobble underlines the point that both were inextricably bound together in the forging of a new working-class movement by emphasizing how women organized through non-traditional, unconventional means, usually outside the lines of the labor union or the political precinct. The women who joined the full employment movement fit Cobble’s description of the clerical, public sector, and manufacturing-based women who became the vanguard of this new movement. As Cobble writes, “Many of the new working women’s organizations relied on ‘below the radar’ pressure tactics such as informal work actions, lawsuits, public shaming, and community-based protest.” The teachers, municipal employees, clerical workers, and social policy experts who provided the organizational leadership of the full employment movement used these very tactics to generate support for the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill. See Cobble, “A ‘Tiger by the Toenail,’” 108–9. 

16 Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality (New York: Verso Press, 2019), 234–6.

17 Gloria Steinem, “A Coalition for Full Employment,” Social Policy 5 (September/October 1974), n.p., in box 1, folder 27, ILR School Extension Division Metropolitan District Office, Anne Nelson Papers, Kheel Center.

18 Chappell “Demanding a New Family Wage,” 272.

19 For the overtures to capitalism by advocates of a bill that directly challenged some of its most basic prerogatives, see Michael Dennis, The Full Employment Horizon in 20^th Century America: The Movement for Economic Democracy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 67–74.

20 Helen Ginsburg, “Needed: A National Commitment to Full Employment,” 14, Sidney Hillman Reprint Series, originally published in Current History, August 1973, available in box 241, folder titled “full employment, 1971–1980,” Jewish Labor Committee Records, Tamiment Institute.

21 Quoted in Harry Fleischman, “Out of Work: The Impact of Unemployment and What’s Being Done About It,” March 1978, Domestic Affairs Department, American Jewish Committee, box 241, folder “full employment, 1971–1980,” Jewish Labor Committee Records, Tamiment Institute.

22 Quoted in Richard Cohen, Director of Public Relations Department press release, “AMERICAN JEWISH CONGRESS URGES PASSAGE OF HUMPHREY-HAWKINS BILL WITH EMPHASIS ON FEDERAL JOBS TO COMBAT UNEMPLOYMENT,” 1–2, March 8, 1978, ibid.

23 Andrew Levison, The Full Employment Alternative (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1980), 196–8.

24 Sylvia Aron, “Toward a Full Employment Policy: An Overview,” Journal of Sociology and Welfare 7 (January 1980): 90.

25 Michael Harrington, Full Employment: The Issue and the Movement. (Institute for Democratic Socialism, 1977), 31–2.

26 Marcus Alexis et al., “An Economic Bill of Rights: Report of a Special Study Group on Problems of Poverty and Racism,” Review of Black Political Economy 3 (Fall 1972): 6–8.

27 Ibid., 9–10.

28 Robert S. Browne expanded on this point in a paper presented at a conference in Detroit in 1977. Black advancement was inextricable from the economic improvement of the nation itself. “At no time in the nation’s history have blacks made significant gains when all others did not. This means full employment is absolutely essential for continued economic progress for the black community. Slow growth, stand-pat policies will do nothing but retard further economic and social progress.” See “U.S Economic Policy and the Problem of Black Unemployment,” 4, box 23, folder 18, Robert S. Browne papers, New York Public Library, Archives and Manuscripts, hereafter abbreviated as NYPL.

29 Ibid.

30 See also Browne, “U.S. Economic Policy and the Problem of Black Unemployment,” 9.

31 “An Economic Bill of Rights: Report of a Special Study Group on Problems of Poverty and Racism,” 11–12.

32 Ibid., 12.

33 Ibid., 37–9.

34 “An Economic Bill of Rights,” 38–9.

35 Robert S. Browne, “Can We Have Full Employment Without Inflation?” Challenge 19 (March–April 1976): 61.

36 Ibid., 61–2.

37 Robert S. Browne, “Black Unemployment and Public Policy—The Need for Full Employment,” 81, The Black Collegian, March–April 1978, box 23, folder 1, Browne papers, NYPL.

38 Quoted in Paul Ruffins, “Black Economists: An ‘Elite Clan of Warrior Intellectuals,’” Diverse Issues in Higher Education, June 23^rd, 2007, available at https://www.diverseeducation.com/students/article/15083870/black-economists-an-elite-clan-of-warrior-intellectuals

39 Famously distilled into attorney Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise” for the benefit of the Chamber of Commerce, this sense of capitalist alarm would lead to action through the establishment of right-wing think tanks, the funding of economics departments to disseminate business-friendly theory, the promotion of business interests in the media, and the foundation of the Business Roundtable. See, for example, Rob Larson, Capitalism vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom (Washington: Zero Books, 2018), 132–6. Marxist criticism of capitalist society and consumerism would abound, but perhaps the most important systematic analysis of how the state functioned in an allegedly representative democracy came with the publication of Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society: The Analysis of the Western Power System (London: Quartet Books, 1969), reprint 1973.