案例库 · 战略与领导 · 战略决策 · 1935
这条还没译成中文，下面是英文原文。
WPA paid below market so workers would leave
Harry Hopkins set WPA wages between relief and private pay so workers would leave once real jobs returned.
Works Progress Administration (Harry Hopkins)
那一手
By 1935, cash relief had kept millions of unemployed Americans from starving through the worst years of the Depression, but Harry Hopkins, the social worker Franklin Roosevelt put in charge of federal relief, argued it left recipients demoralized and idle at scale: "Give a man a dole and you save his body and destroy his spirit." Roosevelt signed the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act on April 8, 1935, and issued Executive Order 7034 on May 6, 1935, establishing the Works Progress Administration to replace cash relief with direct public employment on public works.
A straightforward government jobs program still had to solve a design problem cash relief didn't: if a WPA job paid as well as, or better than, an equivalent private-sector job, workers would have every reason to stay on WPA payrolls indefinitely rather than return to private employment once the economy recovered — turning what was meant as emergency relief into a permanent, self-perpetuating public payroll competing directly with private employers for labor.
为什么管用
- Above dole, so taking the job beats staying on relief.
- Below private pay, so income rises when a real job appears.
- Capped hours keep total pay below full private earnings.
- The gap keeps the program temporary by design.
可以搬走什么
Price support between the floor you replace and the goal you want, so it preserves dignity and the pull toward the better outcome.
后来呢
The WPA employed 8.5 million people from 1935-1943, building 620,000+ miles of streets and 10,000+ bridges for about $11.4 billion. The WPA's security-wage structure became a reference model for later public employment and workfare programs studying how to design a government job that provides income and dignity without eliminating the incentive to return to the private labor market, and the roads, bridges, schools, and public buildings it built remain part of the US built environment today.
资料来源
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