Bernie Sanders' New Deal: ending involuntary unemployment with guaranteed $15/hour infrastructure jobs

Sure, even for infrastructure they’ll need more than construction workers (though mostly they’ll need construction workers) and people can be retrained to some degree, but there’s going to be a bit mis-match in terms of who is being rendered redundant by automation and who is needed to repair roads and bridges and install fiber optic cables (or manage that work). But the proposal, thankfully, isn’t just about infrastructure, so it’s a lot more likely to find jobs for a wider variety of skill-sets. However, taking someone who got automated out of a good union job in manufacturing, for example, and offering them half their previous wage to start over at 50 isn’t going to go over so well. (See the coal miners’ rejection of retraining schemes, for example.) I’m fully behind the idea, but it won’t fully take care of issues around unemployment.

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