No, full employment alone won't solve the problems of inequality that the essay very capably outlines.
But full employment may be necessary anyway, because having the sense of being needed and being useful may be an important factor to many people's well-being. Full employment is really just another way of saying that everyone can get this sense of being needed/useful via employment.
Seriously. People that did those jobs HATED their jobs. Now a group of people have a job again that they hate. Surely we can find something that fulfills their desire to be helpful without a completely unnecessary and unfulfilling job.
So there were no workers, just a driver.
Because of the jobs issue, they went back to having two men that pick up the cans by hand. But because everyone had the new cans with all the extra hardware now the work was harder. It was the worst of both worlds until they issued everyone new regular trash cans a few years later.
It's going to take probably 100 years to get there, but frankly we have no choice. It's either get with the program or buy into some form of population control.
When a plumber gets satisfaction from a good day's work of fixing piping in people's houses, do they get their purpose in life / sense of being needed and useful (note: not the same thing!) from an authority figure? Hell no, unless you think clients are authority figures.
But they are getting this sense from their work.
Heck, even in standard office jobs, I doubt that too many people get their sense of being needed and useful from their bosses or other authority figures (if they get it at all - you don't have to tell me about bullshit jobs). They get this sense from coworkers, clients, or other aspects of the work itself. That's certainly my personal experience. We're social beings, not obedient worker drones.
And I don't know how to put that in a way that gets the point across, but I think a lot of techy types are actually quite arrogant and selfish when they dismiss full employment and think that a UBI would solve all problems.
I get it, most of us would happily work on random open source projects or whatever if we had sufficient UBI, and a lot of that work would be useful to many people. But we should be aware of how rare that is and how lucky that makes us.
Most people don't have that drive or that opportunity, but would still benefit from a social framework in which they are nudged towards doing useful things that they can take pride in and get rewards for (both monetary and psychological). It's like going to the gym: most people don't have the drive, but would ultimately benefit from the offer and a bit of nudging.
Full employment can offer such a social framework (if done right, of course), while a UBI can't (no matter how it is implemented). Who are you to deny this to other people just because they're different from you?
>But they are getting this sense from their work.
I guess I wouldn't say that self-employed professionals have a job. I think of it as a self-employed versus wage-labor distinction.
>Full employment can offer such a social framework (if done right, of course), while a UBI can't (no matter how it is implemented). Who are you to deny this to other people just because they're different from you?
This is, of course, where we actually disagree. I think that while a UBI is by no means a perfect solution to human worth or psychological needs, it's a much better solution than "full" employment to people's material needs, while many many alternatives remain besides employment for the psychological needs. It's a continuous tradeoff made under uncertainty, and we should talk about where we believe the tradeoffs are.
If that's really the best you can come up with, I think it's safe to say that UBI doesn't offer any solutions for human worth or psychological needs. (I also partially get it; solving material needs is easy compared to psychology.)
And it's funny, I never see UBI supporters propose actual solutions for those. It's always just hand-waving, like they are prepared to give lip-service to the issue, but they're not really interested in solving it. It's self-serving politics by an elite who already has all the frameworks for solving their own psychological needs, as long as the material ones are satisfied. At least you have to give the full employment/Job Guarantee folks credit for actually trying to come up with something.
For what it's worth, it's not like those things are in conflict anyway. UBI and full employment are complementary policies, they don't contradict each other.
I guess I don't give so much credit because I'm a weirdo who doesn't get a lot of his psychological self-worth from his work. Yes, work can be interesting and engaging sometimes. So can any number of other things in my life, none of which pay me wages.
I also don't think that assembly-line jobs ever actually provided for people's psychological needs. That's part of why the '60s and '70s had so much wildcat worker militancy: people found that while they were glad to have their material needs met, they had absolute psychological needs beyond what their jobs could ever meet. So to turn it around: I think that "jobs for everyone" is likewise the self-serving politics of an elite who already gain far more life-satisfaction from their professional work than the masses ever will from manufacturing or services.
>For what it's worth, it's not like those things are in conflict anyway. UBI and full employment are complementary policies, they don't contradict each other.
Very true, and we should probably support both.
Often, it can be the opposite. Many people would describe their daily tasks as useless or marginally useful for humanity, while finding meaning in unpaid volunteering.