Bill Mitchell — Tracing the roots of progressive views on the duty to work – Part 5

This is Part 5 of my on-going examination of the concept of ‘duty to work’ and how it was associated with the related idea of a ‘right to work’. In Part 4, I demonstrated that the dual concepts were long-standing ideas and the emergence of neoliberalism distorted their meaning by, one, abandoning the commitment by governments to facilitating the right to work, and, two, perverting the meaning of duty to work. Neoliberalism thus has broken the nexus between the ‘right to work’ responsibilities that the state assumed in the social democratic period and the ‘duty to work’ responsibilities that are imposed on workers in return for income support. That break abandons the binding reciprocity that enriched our societies. In this part, I examine the way in which full employment and work has been treated within the justice literature to extend the notion of reciprocity that we discussed in Part 4. In Part 5 I will consider how this bears on discussions about basic income and coercion....

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Tracing the roots of progressive views on the duty to work – Part 5
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia