Politics and Jobs

The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States

Margaret Weir

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691227856
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Economics

Americans claim a strong attachment to the work ethic and regularly profess support for government policies to promote employment. Why, then, have employment policies gained only a tenuous foothold in the United States? To answer this question, Margaret Weir highlights two related elements: the power of ideas in policymaking and the politics of interest formation.

One ___________________________

Innovation and Boundaries in American Policymaking

DURING the 1980s, American policymakers sought to break with the past. Democratic and Republican politicians alike claimed that a bloated federal government had weakened the national economy, had distorted the conduct of politics, and ultimately had damaged the moral character of the American citizenry. Their solution was to curb government activity. Nowhere was this aim more successfully realized than in the domain of employment policy. Congress dismantled existing employment and training programs, economic policymakers officially repudiated Keynesian prescriptions for managing the national economy, and executive agencies abandoned sectoral initiatives to control inflation.

These changes marked more than an incremental shift in policy: taken together they represented a rejection of the notion that the government could—and should—directly intervene in the economy to ensure adequate employment for its citizens. Thus, the social and economic policy shifts of the 1980s signaled the political failure of a set of ideas that had helped to organize the relationship among the federal government, the economy, and American citizens for more than four decades. With the supremacy of the market rhetorically confirmed, deliberate efforts to create an American employment policy diminished sharply in the 1980s. Instead, as massive deficits drove unemployment down by the mid-1980s, debate about the government’s role in the domain of employment all but vanished from the national agenda.¹

The shifts in perspective and policy were not simply the product of a new president’s political wizardry: existing employment policies found few articulate and energetic advocates. Only a handful in Congress were prepared to defend deficit spending as a regular and necessary tool of economic management; even enthusiastic supporters of employment and training policies were hard pressed to stand behind existing programs. Given the dearth of alternatives, market strategies easily prevailed.

The turn away from government action in the 1980s reflected deeper, long-standing problems with active employment policies in the United States. Although concern about employment issues became a staple in the political rhetoric of postwar America, that concern was unevenly reflected in policy. Despite forty years of experimentation, the United States drew on a truncated repertoire of policies to cope with employment issues; moreover, the measures that were adopted managed to achieve only a tenuous foothold. American employment policy was always an unsettled area, characterized by false starts, poorly implemented programs, and a vacillating national commitment.

This pattern of policy is puzzling when we examine the importance of work in American political culture. For a nation that claims the work ethic as a central feature of its political identity, the United States has been remarkably lax in introducing and sustaining policies that actively promote employment.² The fitful course of experimentation with and abandonment of employment policies has limited the government’s role in facilitating entry into the labor market and easing transitions for those already working. Moreover, heavy reliance on macroeconomic policy has meant that the government has often deliberately restricted the supply of jobs to control inflation. As a result, American policy has by default taken a more passive approach, with policies that simply dole out funds to those in need (for a limited time and, for most programs, in ungenerous amounts) or regulatory policies that monitor hiring practices and working conditions. It has not emphasized policies that promote self-reliance by creating jobs, easing transitions into the labor market for those already working, and facilitating movement into employment for those entering the labor force.

The underemphasis on active employment measures has created a policy configuration curiously out of step with dominant American values. Americans have consistently expressed distaste for programs that provide income assistance for the able-bodied; by contrast, public support for government intervention in the area of employment has been strong.³ But such support has been “a broadly sweeping and vague preference in search of a viable policy”: policymakers have not translated such support into policy.⁴ As a result, American policies have paradoxically operated to promote dependency rather than to encourage economic independence.

This book explores this paradox in American social and economic policy, asking why the scope of employment policy has been so limited in the United States. I examine the development of Keynesian macroeconomic policy and labor market policy, two policy areas central to American efforts to address employment problems after the New Deal, and I analyze failed efforts to extend policy in the 1970s to include economic planning and tripartite cooperation. I argue that the pattern of innovation and failure in each of these domains can be understood by examining how policy problems became framed in particular ways that limited their further development. To make sense of this process, I explore the creation of institutionally based policy networks, the organization of political competition, and the formation of political alliances for each of these policy areas. My approach is historical: I treat the development of policy as a sequential process in which new initiatives created boundaries that restricted the shape of future innovation.

In the United States, I show, such sequences of development had important ramifications for the contours of employment policy. First, American employment policy settled on a narrow definition of the problem to be solved: policy focused on “unemployment,” as defined by a single aggregate figure. Second, policymakers concerned with employment policy rarely conceived their task as one of institution building. Finally, employment issues became partitioned into an “economic” component and a “social” component, each cast into a distinct orbit of politics and administration. Over time, this institutional and political segmentation systematically bounded employment policy and narrowed the possibilities for adapting policy to new political and economic conditions.

In the 1930s, when the federal government first entered the field of employment policy, there was some possibility that economic and social policies relevant to employment would be institutionally and politically linked as mutually reinforcing endeavors, allowing for a broad and flexible approach to employment problems. The initial failure to join these arenas spurred the development of fragmented intellectual, institutional, and interest configurations that left the United States poorly equipped to devise employment policies under the changing political and economic circumstances of the next decades. Instead, employment policies became entangled with two concerns pivotal in American politics: the economic and political position of African-Americans and the role of the federal government. Conflicts in each of these areas stymied the development of institutions to implement employment policy and unraveled the coalitions needed to sustain government action. By the end of the 1970s, racial divisions and government incompetence had set the terms for debates about employment policies, which were increasingly portrayed as wasteful, special interest programs standing in the way of the broad public interest in a prosperous economy peopled by resourceful individuals.

Employment Policy and the American National Community

In the decades after the New Deal, fundamental issues about how the American government should enter the realm of employment remained unsettled. Although much of the policy debate was conducted in technical language, conflicts about employment policy raised fundamental issues, which had implications for the relationship between state and society and ultimately for the meaning of national community in America.

States, Citizens, and Employment Policy

Employment policy provides a context for studying patterns of national policymaking, but it also offers a window onto the fundamental character of a political regime. Because work is at the core of social activity, decisions about employment policies touch on the most basic features of social organization. Public debates about employment can thus be read as struggles to define the proper relationship between states and markets, to extend or contract the meaning of citizenship, and to determine the public role in the ostensibly private sphere of family life.

The pattern of government involvement in employment signals the way a society constructs the boundaries between public and private; embedded in debates about employment issues are assumptions about the status of markets and states. Markets may be defended as a set of private relationships over which the state has no legitimate claim. Alternatively, they may be defined as social constructs, which the state creates and sustains, and over which the state may exercise authority.⁵ Such public authority over markets may be justified on the grounds of national interest. Concerns about national security, both economic and military, provide the rationale for promoting some economic sectors over others to ensure a desired mix of activities.

Because workers are citizens, employment policies also provoke questions about the rights of citizenship and the rights of private employers. How far does the government’s role in ensuring the welfare of its citizens extend into the private marketplace? How a government answers this question will have important ramifications for the relative power of different social groups. By altering the terms on which employers and workers confront each other in the labor market, decisions to intervene in the realm of employment may decisively shift the balance of power in society and alter the contours of politics.

Employment policies also reveal much about social conceptions of family.⁶ Definitions of work, beliefs about who should work, and perceptions of appropriate levels of compensation reflect and in turn influence the economic strategies of families. Modifications in the organization of family life, including changes in the economic roles of women and children, have important implications for how governments intervene in employment matters and for the kinds of demands that emerge from society. Likewise, shifts in family patterns alter the effects of government intervention. Policies premised on particular forms of family may have quite different consequences when the organization of family life changes.

The employment policies adopted in the United States since World War II have embodied ambiguities in each of these spheres. The federal government emerged from the war with an enhanced but vague commitment to watch over the economy; the principles that would guide government action were left murky, and the instruments of intervention remained unspecified. Similarly, the responsibility of the state to the citizen in the realm of employment was never spelled out. Although the federal government professed concern about unemployment, efforts to establish a legal right to a job were repeatedly defeated, and no public response to employment problems was guaranteed. Finally, like the rest of American social policy, employment policy was silently premised on the two-parent, maleheaded household. At the same time, however, employment policy appeared blind to the effects of the economy on families and to the way that changes in families might alter the role of employment policy.⁷

The vague purview, unspoken assumptions, and blind spots in American employment policy reflect the limits of New Deal reform and the consequent bounds of political debate in postwar America.⁸ The lack of a firm political and institutional foundation hindered incremental policy development; moments of political opportunity permitted innovation, but new policies remained ad hoc initiatives, unconnected to any broader justification of the state’s obligation to citizens in the realm of employment. Policy innovations were, accordingly, perpetually vulnerable to political redefinition and contestation.

American ambiguity and vacillation in the sphere of employment contrasts markedly with the better-elaborated policies and forthright commitments characteristic of many European industrial democracies in the postwar era. In some nations, government action rested on a political commitment to provide full employment; in others, established forms of intervention allowed further development of policies relevant to employment. Sweden combined a firm commitment to full employment with an elaborate set of active labor market policies. West Germany developed a weaker version of labor market policy but politically downplayed the centrality of full employment. In Britain, full employment was central to postwar politics, but policies remained limited and, for the most part, short-lived. France eschewed public commitment to full employment but developed extensive planning policies that allowed the government control over important aspects of employment.⁹

Despite this considerable variation in the lines of policy stressed and in the political prominence accorded employment efforts in European nations, nowhere was government intervention in the realm of employment as politically contested and as institutionally anchorless as in the United States. American employment policy reveals a pattern of frustration evident in each of the major initiatives of the postwar era.

The American Pattern of Employment Policy

Since the 1930s, diverse initiatives and often unexpected innovations in American employment policy have suggested that policy in this area has not been bound by some set of predetermined limits. Nonetheless, over time, a pattern of frustration and political failure has characterized active employment policies in the United States. Initiatives typically were launched in a burst of innovation, followed by abandonment or significant dilution. Underlying this pattern was the inability of these policies to sustain the political support that marked their initial reception. Active employment policies have also been remedial; they targeted “losers” in the economic system as opposed to being universally available, and they were typically enacted after economic problems emerged, rather than being preventive or proactive policies.

These features of individual employment policies influenced the broader pattern of policy over time: although American policymakers often treated them as separate realms, these policy areas were in fact closely connected. Decisions about macroeconomic management made in the 1940s narrowed the possibilities for decisionmaking about labor market policy in the 1960s; decisions about both shaped the debates about planning and tripartite (government-business-labor) cooperation in the 1970s. To make sense of employment policy in the United States, we need to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter One: Innovation and Boundaries in American Policymaking
• Chapter Two: Creating an American Keynesianism
• Chapter Three: Race and the Politics of Poverty
• Chapter Four: Public Employment and the Politics of “Corruption”
• Chapter Five: The Political Collapse of Full Employment
• Chapter Six: Policy Boundaries and Political Possibilities
• Notes
• Index