New deal programs lessons

Explain that this legislative program, designed to ameliorate or fix different aspects of the Depression, became known as the New Deal. The agencies can be used to put together a vocabulary quiz or as part of a end-of-the-unit assessment. Depending upon how many students you have in class and their capabilities, you can either assign each student multiple agencies or have groups of students share an agency. The activity runs as follows:.

Students are then responsible for finding all of the other agencies represented in the room. They must share with other students to accomplish this. Tell them how many agencies total you expect them to have and set an appropriate time limit to keep them moving. If you wish to extend the activity, add some more time to the clock and require students to have some of the definitions memorized when time is up.

Policies regarding setting payments remained contentious throughout the s, and were periodically changed in response to demands from workers, on one hand, and from the private sector, on the other.

Perhaps the clearest example concerned the changing policies regarding a minimum work relief wage rate. Implemented in July , the virtually unremitting complaints that the minimum rate of thirty cents per hour was above some private sector rates and thereby attracted workers away from the private sector to the work programs led to its abrupt termination in November In the intervening years, progress has been made.

The enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act in established a federal minimum wage, although many states have enacted a higher minimum wage because the federal rate has been so eroded since by the failure to sufficiently adjust it for inflation. And for several decades we have witnessed the spread of living wage campaigns, which mandate that city employees and employees of companies that do a certain amount of business with a city should be paid a wage that is high enough to keep a family of four about the poverty line.

A minimum pay rate that provides a living wage—one that enables a family to have a reasonable standard of living—also makes good economic sense.

Plans thus far represent a good beginning. Yet much more needs to be done. Current plans are primarily for construction projects. It would be helpful to also consider longer-range plans, and projects that take longer than two years to complete, such as development of light rail systems, as these could address some of the pressing needs for green infrastructure.

Services will be aided indirectly through some of the billions of dollars going to states. This is also important—although given the sizable budget deficits faced by many states, even these funds will only begin to cover many necessary services that will otherwise go unfunded. Thus far, most of the Recovery Act funds for health and education have been allocated for research. There are additional needs that should be addressed as well.

Provision of services in education, health care, and eldercare throughout the country could benefit from additional resources. And we would do well to recall the federal support for the arts during the s, which provided jobs for a variety of artists as well as classes and productions for the public. The third category of projects from the s—production-for-use—has remained dormant since those programs ended.

Perhaps they should be resurrected. Of particular concern is the growing numbers of factories that are being shut down. What should happen with the plant and equipment as well as the former employees? As a society, should we just accept that if something is not sufficiently profitable, then it should be abandoned? Or should the Ohio Plan be brought back—and previous employees put to work in their old places of employment? This does not mean that the old production methods and former goods should be brought back unchanged.

For example, support for the auto industry could be based on changing production from environmentally unsustainable vehicles to public transit such as buses and trains.

Instead of periodically reacting to escalating unemployment by developing programs to create jobs, it would make good social and economic sense to implement a permanent job creation program. This is not a new idea. The commitment to national planning was incorporated into the Full Employment Bill of The federal government would fill this investment gap, if necessary with deficit spending. Support for the intensive federal planning and investment included in the bill was undermined by economic and political events.

Instead of the expected post-war recession, the U. The results were not surprising, as the Full Employment Bill of became the watered-down Employment Act of The government would serve as employer of last resort for people unable to find jobs through the labor market, establishing a program that would go into effect when the unemployment rate rose above 3 percent.

And attention was given to combating discrimination—based on race, gender, age, and physical and mental capacity. Benefits of full employment described in the Humphrey-Hawkins Act bear remembering today. Economic impacts included increased aggregate demand which would counteract recessions, rescuing labor power that would otherwise be lost, and reducing the cost of transfer payment programs.

A permanent government job creation program continues to garner support from economists and other social scientists. The National Jobs for All Coalition was founded in to build a movement and advocate for real full employment at livable wages.

And The Nation has been publishing more articles supporting full employment at fair rates of pay. In making the case for a permanent job creation program, we should remember that these programs do two important things. They provide both jobs for people who are unemployed and underemployed, as well as much needed public facilities, services, and in the s, consumer goods. Job creation is important, but it is not sufficient. In order to give both women and men real choices about combining work in the home with jobs outside the home, we also need progressive family and labor market policies.

All we have to do is to copy programs that are already in effect in Canada and western European countries. A family allowance, instead of welfare, would help enable parents to more easily spend time doing this valuable caring labor.

A paid six-month family leave would make it easier for both women and men to take care of infants as well as family members who are ill. Flexible work hours would allow women and men to reduce hours of wage labor in order to spend more time working in the home.

Universal federal health care would enable everyone to obtain quality health care regardless of their welfare or labor market status. Federally supported quality child care, including subsidies for child-care workers, would recognize the social responsibility for children and similarly eliminate this expense as a barrier to wage-labor. And an adequate supply of low cost housing would help provide shelter for all people. Equitable Growth supports research and policy analysis on how trends in economic inequality and mobility and changes in the economy have affected the concentration of wealth, income, and earnings, and how these distributional shifts have affected the promise of economic security and opportunity.

Equitable Growth supports research and policy analysis on how tax and macroeconomic policies can promote stable and broad-based economic growth. Climate change activists in the United States and around the world can take heart from recent polls that show a majority of Americans in both major political parties and all ages support interventions to reduce greenhouse gases and encourage renewable energy.

Ferocious hurricanes, extensive flooding, and destructive fires certainly help underscore the dire situation for the public. Yet the scale of action and the agenda for change that many Americans endorse is nowhere near as ambitious as what the authors of a proposed array of policies, collectively known as a Green New Deal, are calling for.

Their proposals, although in flux, generally call for a total shift to renewable energy within 10 years, as well as the creation of a transformative green economy that will provide decent jobs with benefits, universal healthcare, and more affordable housing and infrastructure investments.

A Green New Deal, in short, is conceived as the opening wedge in a radical shift from a private, market-based neoliberal economy to a more social democratic one, where new federal policies will create a more egalitarian, just, and greener United States.

Advocates for this revolutionary change have seized the mantle of the New Deal of the s and s as their inspiration—and for good reason. Together, I believe there are four key lessons that Green New Dealers can take from the original New Dealers and the eventual breakdown in support of federal government intervention in the U.

Before the New Deal, many of the workers in the steel mills, packing plants, and other industrial workshops of a city such as Chicago lived political lives defined narrowly by their local ward boss, either a Democrat or a Republican—that is, if, as first- and second-generation Americans, they even voted or participated politically at all.

For African Americans, the national Democratic Party was the enemy, the party of their southern oppressors and the party to vote against now that they were in the North. Moreover, within workplaces, unions, to the extent that they existed in the s, were dominated by elite usually white and native-born craft workers, who aimed to limit opportunity for the more numerous, less skilled, and commonly immigrant nonunion workers.

After the union organizing defeats of , unions held little promise for lesser-skilled industrial workers. Workers also looked to the paternalistic welfare programs that their employers had instituted in the s to protect themselves against the failed, but still worrisome, unionization drives that had followed World War I. Companies touted such benefits as paid sick leave and vacation, pensions, and employee representation to foster loyalty in their workers, but their unwillingness to put their money where their promises were gave few workers full access to these benefits.

Faced with a global Great Depression, ordinary working-class Chicagoans, in a few short years, had become enthusiastic adherents of a national Democratic Party with FDR at the helm, voting in much greater—and Democratic—numbers in national elections.

By , one in three workers in Chicago manufacturing would be a union member, whereas 10 years earlier hardly any had been. The political landscape of Chicago was transformed.

Workers who, not many years before, had ignored or shunned the national Democratic Party, had had few connections to Washington, and had been excluded from national unions now identified with the national government and a nationwide party and union. Given the challenge today to mobilize ordinary Americans for an ambitious climate policy agenda in the 21st century, what can they learn from the original New Dealers, who successfully recruited supporters to such a paradigm-shifting program more than eight decades ago?

First, President Roosevelt and his advisers never had a master plan for the New Deal of the s.