What Happens When Jobs Are Guaranteed? — Nick Romeo

Critics of labor-market programs such as the Job Guarantee argue that they enable precisely this sort of choice—they make it easier to decline work that one doesn’t like. One program participant in his thirties told me that, while on unemployment benefits, he’d been offered a job cleaning toilets at a gas station; he’d decided that he didn’t want “that sort of job,” and had instead found work in the carpentry workshop. If everyone were guaranteed a reasonably pleasant job, suited to their interests and needs and paying a living wage, who would do the grungy, difficult work? Austrian employers, like those in America, are currently having difficulty hiring people to take hard, poorly paid jobs; many of the workers in Austria who wash dishes or clean hotel rooms are immigrants from Eastern Europe, and during the pandemic many of them went home, some for good. Jörg Flecker, a sociologist at the University of Vienna who is evaluating the program in Gramatneusiedl, told me that pressure from employers could prevent its expansion across Austria. “Employers say, ‘There are so many unemployed. We have to have a tougher regime for them because we have jobs to fill.’ "

See Michal Kalecki, Political Aspects of Full Employment. The MMT JG is anti-capitalist in the eyes of employers and therefore it faces an uphill fight politically under "capitalism" as the economic system that favors capital over labor as a factor of production.

The New Yorker Magazine
What Happens When Jobs Are Guaranteed?

Nick Romeo

Unrelated but interesting from the perspective of employment preferences.

PsyPost
Women like working with people, men like working with things, all across the world
Vladimir Hedrih