People Must Live by Work. Steven Attewell
Читать онлайн книгу.
the “fresh, vital” alternative to the status quo, it would have to displace both the PWA and public works. Throughout 1935, therefore, the WPA studied its rival and developed arguments about both why direct job creation was superior and why the counterargument could undermine the WPA.
Using the PWA’s own statistics against them, WPA analysts were convinced the PWA could not possibly achieve the goals of an expanded employment program, due to its insistence that local communities take out and then repay federal loans in order to keep the federal government’s balance sheet in balance. Local communities could not really afford to contribute more than 30 percent of the total costs of a job program, even with $10 million a month in additional federal support if communities borrowed money for self-liquidating projects.24 Moreover, the heavy construction favored by the PWA would dramatically increase nonlabor costs (land, materials, and machinery), which consumed 55 percent of the PWA’s budget. By contrast only 37 percent of PWA spending went to direct labor costs—so a PWA model would produce relatively few jobs per dollars spent.
Using FERA and CWA statistics, Baker estimated that the new WPA could limit nonlabor costs to 30 percent of the total, while providing federal grants rather than loans.25 In this way, poor communities where the unemployed and the poor were concentrated could actually be assisted by the federal government. Crucially, nonlabor costs would be limited, allowing a focus on the job-creating potential of a given amount of federal spending rather than fiscal orthodoxy.
This last point was the most ideologically salient—economic theory had primed WPA bureaucrats to think of larger payrolls as the straightest line to recovery; their growing commitment to the idea of a right to a job made every additional job that could be created out of the ERA’s appropriation both an economic and a moral advance. Direct labor and nonlabor costs allowed them to quantify the virtues of the two approaches. Every percentage of ERA funds that could be wrested from nonlabor to labor costs meant thousands and thousands of people saved from destitution. At the same time, the WPA’s experts were well aware that the great mass of the unemployed to whom they had provided relief through FERA and jobs via the CWA were overwhelmingly unskilled workers who had been out of the private labor market for several years. Private contractors who worked with the PWA preferred to use skilled workers, who knew how to use machinery to maximize productivity and minimize labor costs. If the PWA’s model were to succeed, the unskilled unemployed would have no place.26
In 1935, this was the ideology of the WPA, influenced by ideas about unemployment rates and consumer demand, rooted in an identification with the poor as frustrated workers and with work as a liberating force, and convinced that traditional public works would condemn millions to poverty. These policymakers cut across two tracks of social policy. The WPA primarily served a clientele that composed mostly white men, blue-collar workers but also professionals, and frequently older men who were heads of households. (Younger men were covered by the CCC, and school-aged men and women were covered by the National Youth Authority [NYA].) After the New Deal, these workers would be covered by social insurance, which was a source of privilege and a spur to postwar inequality, as Ira Katznelson shows in his book When Affirmative Action Was White. Moreover, WPA clients contributed their labor in the same way convention retirees were seen to have “earned” their Social Security benefits through contributions deducted from their wages. That parallel put the WPA in a different light from noncontributory welfare programs.
Yet direct job creation was not wholly within the boundaries of social insurance, because it hired from among the ranks of those on relief. As much as they tried to also incorporate the unemployed not on relief, at the end of the day, the administrators of the CWA and WPA had to deal with the fact that there were twenty million Americans on relief, of whom 3.5 million were able-bodied unemployed workers that desperately needed jobs. As much as we would hope that the public would view them compassionately, more traditional attitudes that singled out those on relief as members of the “unworthy poor” (by making them take the pauper’s oath, for example) persisted.27 This attitude continued despite the fact that these workers were older white males, complicating the narrative of public assistance as an inherently female and nonwhite “track.”
Thus, the WPA existed between social insurance and social welfare, neither one nor the other.
The WPA’s Plan of Action
As a first step toward the right to a job, direct job creation advocates had developed a plan for action, using the CWA as a model. The WPA would employ the jobless, pulling as many as possible off the unemployment rolls.28
In 1934, these experts (then working for the FERA and the CWA) modeled a number of different scenarios in a series of studies, including “The Cost of an Expanded Public Employment Program,” “Summary of Relief Requirements,” “The Work Program,” “A Plan to Give Work to the Able-Bodied,” “Comparing PWA to FERA,” “Transition from Work Relief to the Work Program,” “The Works Program,” “Two Pages on Politics,” “Memorandum to the President,” and “A Program for Social and Economic Security.” They ended with “A National Work Program.” Collectively, these reports represent a spectrum of proposals, of which the initial plan to extract 3.5 million workers from relief rolls was only the starting point.
Following these proposals, Emerson Ross, Jacob Baker, Gill, and others in the WPA crafted a series of plans that sought to mimic the size of the CWA, providing three million jobs to relief workers and an additional 1.5 million jobs for the unregistered unemployed, on a long-term basis. Other proposals envisioned a graduating job program for six to eight million, where the majority would be ordinary, unemployed workers who had “graduated” from the ranks of relief recipients back into the status of “regular” workers. At the high end, WPA administrators proposed offering jobs to 60–80 percent of the unemployed, and they couched the plan as a first step toward realizing the right to a job.29 Their ambitions grew over time. In the early part of the year, they were thinking in modest terms. By October they were up to six million—covering a majority of the unemployed.
Rather than their ultimate goal, 3.5 million jobs was the minimum number that the WPA advocates were willing to live with, corresponding to the entire “employable” population of the twenty million on relief.30 While the WPA leadership hoped to be universal and take every person in need of work, the somewhat limited financial scope of the ERA led them to restrict their program to those most in need of support: relief clients who had been unemployed the longest, and heads of households (to uphold gender norms and spread available support across as many households as possible). However, they continued to plan for the future and lobby for an expanded job program down the road that would more closely resemble a universal “right to a job.”
Similarly, while WPA planners sought to establish wages well above the paltry limits of relief or work relief, they were trapped between their desire to hire as many people as possible and the limited amount of federal funds provided by the ERA. Wages would have to take a seat behind jobs as a priority. WPA administrators were willing to continue their policy of offering “security wages,” based on wage rates of relief programs. Some of them, like Gill, feared higher wages would disincentivize workers from accepting job offers from the private sector, if the latter offered wages lower than government scale—but most of them accepted the policy only as a matter of necessity and a way to maximize the number of jobs created. Even so, not a few WPA staffers welcomed more expansive “prevailing wages” when they thought it politically possible and also when they could win additional appropriations to pay for it.
Baker and Ross especially were creative about finding projects that were low in materials and equipment costs but very labor-intensive. Baker pointed to the “improvement of public resources” and publicly owned utilities and also included “housing and building construction for low-income groups and impoverished communities” and “production and distribution of goods needed by the unemployed” as key fields of action.31 A common thread there was attending to the human needs of city dwellers: “low-cost housing for cities” was conceived of as part of a package with “schools, auditoriums, community houses,” or “fuel, clothing, bedding, shoes, household furnishing, and a variety of food products.”32 These goods transcended the boundaries between public and private, which under a new WPA