They outline the legislative and activist struggles from the 1940s to the 1970s that shaped the concept of full employment, culminating in the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978. [...] Over the subsequent decades, the vision of full employment that had underpinned the struggle for the 1945 bill was kept alive by the civil rights movement, and it found new expressions in the 1960s. [...] Though weakened, the still-substantive version of the new full employment law now directed the president to pursue policies that reduced the unemployment rate to below 3 percent for workers over the age of 20 and below 4 percent for workers under the age of 20. [...] The Cost of a Shock: Impact on Marginalized Communities Since the monetary tightening of 1979, the collective disregard of the true ethos of the full employment movement and the relative overemphasis on aggregate quantitative metrics of unemployment has had a deleterious impact on the well-being of communities of color, especially Black Americans. [...] The unfortunate legacy of the Volcker shock and the preceding dilution of the idea of true full employment is a willingness to accept higher rates of unemployment for marginalized communities as the norm.
- Pages
- 19
- Published in
- United States of America
