New Orleans       We hear a lot about the Federal Reserve, especially when the nation is struggling to deal with either unemployment or inflation, or, worse, both at the same time.  Former President Trump in a hollow piece of demagoguery claimed recently that if elected, he would make sure interest rates were lowered.  In real life, the Federal Reserve by statute is a completely independent agency and once a president appoints its members, he or she can rant all they want, jawbone everyday he or she can, or stand in front of their building with a protest sign for all the good it would do, but he’s got no say over their decisions.

The Federal Reserve is always clear that it has two mandates.  One is to curb inflation to less than 3% per year, and the other is to attempt to achieve full employment.  Where did this scope of their work get defined?  Well, it was in the much maligned, heavily diluted and eviscerated Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978.  It is a historic and political anomaly that this heavily contested act should have found longevity in the Federal Reserve’s mission, rather than in the workplaces where it was originally intended by Minnesota Senator and former Vice-President Hubert Humphery and California Representative Gus Hawkins from the Los Angeles area.

Those of us with longer memories than we likely deserve to remember something about the fight over this bill’s enactment because at the top line, it was supposedly about full employment.  The fact that the end game of this battle for passage was during the wild inflation that marked President Carter’s presidency and personal obsession is part of the backstory on how this mandate evolved.

Until recently, reading Staying Alive:  The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class by Vanderbilt professor and historian Jefferson Cowie, I had forgotten some of the promise the original bill had offered.  The original bill gave Americans a guarantee of a job.  ACORN and others have fought for living wages for decades, but we were never bold enough to demand a universal right to a job.  Humphrey-Hawkins not only initially made that promise, it also included a prospective worker’s right to sue the government if in fact they didn’t have a job.  As Cowie notes, “the bill sought to grant the universal right to a job—a melding of 1960s rights consciousness with the unfinished economic agenda of the late New Deal.”  The bill made going to court the last resort because there was a preemptive job creation and delivery mechanism that required the creation of “local reservoirs of public service and private employment projects developed by local planning councils, the creation of Job Guarantee Offices able to fund these projects, and a Standby Job Corps for temporary placement of workers.”

It’s mind-boggling to remember how close we came to being there, but by bad fortune.  The right-to-sue was the first thing to drop from the bill, even as the guarantee stood.  Critically, the bill also dropped wage-and-price controls even though they had been mandatory under Roosevelt and effective, though voluntary, under Nixon, which then hurt them in other ways. The AFL-CIO wanted them out of the bill, because they thought it would damage their bargaining ability, even though their misunderstanding of their strength then seems staggering now.  As one piece and protection for workers after another was compromised due to a tepid effort by the White House, fierce opposition by business, mixed signals from economists, and flagging effort from labor and its allies, the bill finally passed in hardly recognizable form.  Partly, that might have been a flower thrown on Humphrey’s grave as he passed away in 1978.  Partly, that came from the recasting of its mission as dealing with the weird marriage of employment and inflation which explains the Federal Reserve now.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda, all that feels like a fight we would like to do over.  There’s likely no great market in public life for the demand now for a guarantee of employment, but in many ways it seems natural.  As the right continues to add work requirements to healthcare, welfare, and other safety net programs, wouldn’t it make sense to couple that with a job guarantee for all that are able? The Act still established as a national goal the fulfillment of the right to full opportunities for useful paid employment at fair rates of compensation of all individuals able, willing, and seeking to work.  Making that language come alive and have some teeth would be a great campaign.