When U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) released the framework for the Green New Deal last week, one thing started coming up again and again in partisan bluster against the platform of ideas.
Conservative writers began claiming that the plan for the Green New Deal, which was released as a nonbinding resolution in the House, said that anyone who is unwilling to work will be paid by the government.
This came up first thing in this Tucker Carlson segment with Ocasio-Cortez adviser and Cornell University law professor Robert Hockett, who said the phrase came from documents “doctored” by conservatives. That’s not true, but the phrase isn’t in the resolution for the Green New Deal either, so what gives?
When they went public with the resolution, Ocasio-Cortez’s team also released a sheet of frequently asked questions, which pledged to “build on FDR’s second bill of rights by guaranteeing … economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work.”
That alone doesn’t promise to pay people who don’t want to work, since “economic security” could mean a ton of different things. But describing people as “unable or unwilling to work” does come up in writings from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the division of the Department of Labor that collects and analyzes labor data. They’re the folks who report the actual numbers for economically vital things like the unemployment rate.
So, yeah, you’ll find those words on the bureau’s site, but there are other words all around them, and those words also say stuff. What I’m getting at is the phrase “unable or unwilling to work” in the Ocasio-Cortez handout is missing context.
Here’s an example of the phrase out in the wild: An article in the October issue of BLS’ monthly journal covered the labor force participation rate, or the number of people in the labor force who are at least 16 years old.
That number has been going down for a long time, nearly two decades. BLS cited a piece in the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s “Economic Insights” that concluded a declining participation rate “means that more people are unable or unwilling to work at the prevailing wage rate.”
In 1954, 98 percent of men who were 25 to 54 years old were in the work force. That number has dropped to 88 percent, mainly because baby boomers are retiring, but also because of an increasing wage gap. Four decades ago, men could make more with just a high school education under their belt than they can now, even if they earned just 72 cents for every dollar a man with a college degree earned.
By 2016, a man with a high school education earned almost half that of a college graduate.
The phrase also comes up when discussing unemployment benefits. It shows up, for instance, in a policy manual for the state of Alaska, which says applicants are usually denied benefits if they refuse full-time work “unless the claimant has a compelling reason. There are circumstances that could provide good cause, for example the inability to secure child-care during full-time hours, or reasons of health.”
All of this seems pretty relevant if we hop back to the FAQ’s mention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second bill of rights.
In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt said that the Bill of Rights weren’t enough to guarantee equality, and Americans have already tacitly accepted a second Bill of Rights, which calls for the right to a job and a decent education, among other things.
“People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made,” he said.
All of this is a generous amount of guesswork, since Ocasio-Cortez’s team hasn’t clarified what was meant by the “unwilling to work” phrase. Her staff have said, however, that the FAQ was unfinished and not meant to be published.
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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