Setting a positive agenda: answering the Republicans.

The new Republican majority has proposed an extraordinarily harsh agenda: eliminating subsidized housing, limiting the duration of welfare benefits, and capping funding for school lunch programs. Republicans claim this program grows out of a "contract" with the middle class. Progressives of any stripe seem reduced to little more than opposition to these draconian changes. Part of the reason, however, that the poor are both defenseless and distrusted is that traditional liberal policies never really empowered the poor or even the great majority of U.S. workers. Liberalism set itself up for this backlash. Progressives need a diagnosis of "welfare dependency" which moves us beyond both the New Deal and Newt.

We can begin to understand both why so many depend on welfare and why many others distrust welfare recipients when we look at what the recent economic "boom" means for the quality of citizens' lives. The only boom I see is in temp agencies and the stock market. Many of the new jobs in this recovery are part-time or temporary and offer no benefits. Businesses are able to keep costs low and profits high--but at great long-run detriment to society.

Many of those fortunate enough to have full-time jobs are now working long hours at jobs which remain rote, narrow, and minutely supervised. Such work stimulates neither creativity nor long-term productivity gains. Much of the increased overtime is imposed by bosses who can fire recalcitrant workers.

We have, in short, a two-tiered workforce: poor and disproportionately minority workers moving in and out of short-term, part-time, subpoverty-level jobs, and overworked traditional full-time factory and office workers. The latter are insecure and afraid of losing their jobs, but fear and overwork do not make productive workplaces. Productivity growth and incomes stagnate. Even so, their managers, subject to the pressures of pension and mutual funds, worry more about short-term profits than longterm investment in job redesign and worker training for either employed or unemployed workers. Since overworked employees enjoy little opportunity for family life or the development of skills and interests inside or outside those jobs, they can all too easily come to resent those who--for whatever reasons--are not working full-time and receive even meager support from government.

Conservatives can easily step into this climate and promise lower taxes and freedom from government "strangulation" of the market. However, those with any historical sense know that unregulated markets lead to extremes of wealth and poverty and uncushioned business cycles which can destroy societies. We must, therefore, devise an alternative which improves the quality, of life for both welfare recipients and traditional office and factory workers.

In the current climate of hostility to welfare, progressives should begin with a critique of welfare for the rich and a program which would, like Social Security, offer a universal safety net which would benefit everyone. Republican cuts in housing assistance should be opposed, but progressives should also point out that the government's biggest housing program is not for the poor but for the rich. Eighty percent of the $52 billion in benefits conveyed by the deductibility of home-mortgage interest goes to the top 20 percent of the income pyramid. If this program were to be changed to a simple tax credit (the benefit from which does not depend on one's tax bracket), and capped at a reasonable amount, it would increase the supply of affordable housing for all poorer and working-class citizens--without added cost to the government.

Tax and welfare policies affecting parents of young children are also in need of reforms modeled on European child-allowance programs. In the U. S. context, progressives should advocate a universal child allowance of at least $3,000 per child for preschool children. This allowance would ease the burden of poor single mothers at the same time as it reduced some of the financial pressures and provided more flexibility for middle-class families. Such changes could easily be funded by very modest increases in the progressivity of the tax code and by cuts in the cold-war military budget.

The largest single task of a progressive politics is to create good jobs. The needs of the old and the young, both for education, companionship, and preventive health care, are neglected. Community development agencies should be funded at a level based on the amount of local unemployment and should have the right to establish priorities and invest in energy and transit programs, nonprofits meeting community needs, and even private-sector businesses willing to make long-term training and employment commitments.

Periodic borrowing by government is needed to fund social investment and smooth the business cycle, but deficits are not the only way to create new jobs. Nor should we be eternally wedded to the forty- (or more) hour work week as "full-time" if we care about quality of life. Outlawing forced overtime would by itself create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Over the longer haul, labor should have the right to convert future gains in productivity into shorter working hours rather than higher yearly wages. Employers should also not be allowed to discriminate against part-time workers by denying them prorated benefits. These changes would increase the number of quality full- and part-time jobs and give workers more time for family and leisure pursuits.

Deficit spending and higher employment levels need not lead to inflation, a weaker currency, or an "uncompetitive " economy if these changes are accompanied by reforms of the corporate work-process itself. Several recent studies have shown that giving workers an independent voice in the design of job ladders and broader corporate planning improves productivity. Reforms of pension-fund and banking practices could allow citizens and workers to use their own savings to help foster such trends. These reforms are not simply more "big government." They would level the economic playing field and make our markets more just and efficient.

Even after such progressive changes, there will be some for whom pressing family obligations, health, and emotional problems will make transition into even a humane world of work impossible. Surely we must preserve a genuine safety net for those who cannot or even will not work. I am convinced, however, that welfare rolls will shrink dramatically in a society where the number of remunerative and stimulating jobs grows. Just as important, I believe that willingness to shoulder the responsibility of welfare will grow when most citizens enjoy just compensation in reasonable workplaces and have more time for friends, family, and leisure pursuits.

Since this agenda will not be adopted any time soon, wouldn't it be more prudent to concentrate on opposing cuts in the present safety net? We must in fact make such fights, but welfare will not blunt the forces which expand the pool of poor, jobless citizens nor lessen the growing emotional and economic burdens on a tired working class. They are palliatives at best. If activists don't keep a more radical analysis and agenda alive, the increasing difficulties of traditional liberal reforms in stemming the tide of corporate power can only contribute to an intensified and more belligerent conservatism.

John Buell is author of Democracy by Other Means: The Politics of Work, Leisure, and Environment, which will be published by the University of Illinois Press in July.