Letter on Full Employment
Every day we are told that work is the highest moral good. Politicians praise hard-working families. The media laments those who are "economically inactive." Bureaucracies assess the deserving and undeserving poor. Yet we live inside an economic order that is deliberately designed to ensure not everyone can work. The same state that proclaims the virtue of labour also enforces a system that withholds it. It is not a failure of policy; it is the policy.
For much of the twentieth century, governments treated full employment as a public responsibility. After the Great Depression and two world wars, planners and economists recognised that idle labour was waste—human and economic. Keynes argued that the market alone would never guarantee jobs for all, and that only collective intervention could stabilise the system. The welfare state, housing programmes, and nationalised industries grew from this conviction: that work was not just a private contract but a social good.
Then, somewhere between the 1970s and 1980s, the idea of full employment was quietly buried. A new orthodoxy emerged: monetarism, price stability, and labour discipline. Economists gave it a neutral name—the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, or NAIRU. Beneath the acronym lies a moral choice: maintain a pool of jobless people to stop wages rising too fast. Fear becomes an instrument of policy. Stability is bought with insecurity.
The cruelty is doubled by denial. Having designed structural unemployment, the system then blames individuals for it. Job centres become moral tribunals; social safety nets turn into disciplinary devices. Benefits are conditional, language is punitive, and the unemployed are recast as deficient citizens. The moral inversion is complete: those excluded from work are told their exclusion is their fault.
The social cost of this design runs deep. We internalise precarity as normal. Young people learn to treat work as a privilege rather than a right. Communities fracture as jobs vanish and dignity with them. The language of productivity replaces that of purpose. Even our built environment bears the marks—empty shops, neglected public buildings, shrinking planning departments, civic neglect disguised as fiscal prudence.
It is a strange economy that measures success by how few people it can safely employ. Stranger still that we have learned to moralise its logic. We call it discipline, efficiency, competitiveness. But underneath lies fear: the knowledge that one misstep could push anyone into the category of the surplus. We have made insecurity the price of order.
This is not inevitable. If the state can design unemployment, it can also design employment. A public job guarantee—directed towards housing, care, climate adaptation, and civic renewal—would use idle capacity to meet unmet needs. We could treat work as a stabiliser, not a casualty, of economic management. Call it full employment by design.
The means already exist. Retrofit programmes, local infrastructure repair, data and planning transparency—each could become a source of stable, meaningful public work. These are not abstract ideals; they are the scaffolding of a civilised economy. We simply choose not to fund them, because fear remains the cheaper tool of control.
To demand full employment is not to deny efficiency or markets. It is to restore moral sanity to the design of the economy. Every person who wants to contribute should have the right to do so. The absence of that opportunity is not personal failure; it is system error.
The revolution this demands is not violent. It is administrative, moral, and patient. It begins with seeing through the euphemisms—"flexibility," "competitiveness," "price stability"—to the quiet cruelty they conceal. It ends when we rebuild an economy planned around human potential, not human fear.
Full employment is not utopia. It is what a sane society would call normal.