WPA Anniversary Demonstrates How a National Jobs Programs Could Help Now

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the creation of the Work Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal jobs program created in 1935 that directly created millions of jobs and provided essential income for the unemployed workers and their families during the Great Depression.

The WPA was the largest program enacted by President Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression. Between 1935 and 1943, the agency provided almost eight million jobs to struggling Americans to work on critical infrastructure and other projects across the country.

Today, the Great Recession has put nearly 16 million Americans out of work. While economists credit the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act with helping to break the recession and creating or saving more than two million jobs, employers have remained cautious about ramping up hiring to pre-recession levels, creating too few employment opportunities for laid-off workers and young adults entering the workforce for the first time. The Senate’s failure to extend unemployment benefits that ran out this week for unemployed and underemployed workers is making weathering the crisis even harder for millions of Americans.

Many civil rights groups and experts are urging Congress to implement a large-scale jobs program like the WPA to put millions of Americans back to work quickly and jumpstart an economic recovery.

“These programs restored dignity and self-esteem, provided real and necessary income, and created some of our most lasting and noteworthy public resources from which everyone has benefited,” said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change. “When designed carefully, jobs programs can significantly boost employment for those in immediate need and help stimulate an economic recovery that doesn’t leave vulnerable communities behind.”

The Leadership Conference and many economists are urging Congress to pass the Local Jobs for America Act, introduced last month by Rep. George Miller, D. CA. The Miller bill would authorize $100 billion in funding over two years for preserving state and local government jobs, creating local government jobs, and creating jobs in the non-profit sector.  It is estimated to save or create more than one million jobs.

“Unless we spend significantly more money now to put people back to work … our chance for any real economic recovery will be lost,” Bhargava said. 

+Deepak Bhargava’s Huffington Post WPA Anniversary blog post