Job Guarantee

The Green New Deal will result in a net job creation of approximately 20 million people (over 22 million new jobs, minus the 2 million fossil fuel jobs that will be transitioned to Green New Deal jobs).

As of April 2019, here is a breakdown of all the people that could be employed full-time but are not:
Unemployed: 5.8 million
Involuntary part-time: 4.7 million
looked for work in the last year but gave up: 1.6 million

As CNN asks, "In all, of the 94.6 million not working, 87.1 million were retired, in school, taking care of a loved one or physically unable to work. That leaves 7.5 million people. What about them? Of those, 1.6 million had looked for a job in the past year or wanted a job but had given up searching for more than a year. And 5.9 million workers listed "other" as a reason for not wanting or having a job. We don't know much about these workers."

However, we do know, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that there were 7.8 million workers in 2016, working either almost full-time to full-time, who are classified as 'working poor', that is, who live in poverty. Surely, these 7.8 million people could use a better job.

So we have 5.8 + 4.17 + 1.6 + 7.8 = 19.9 million people, which we can round up to 20 million people who definitely need a good job. Since this is the number of jobs created by a Green New Deal after transitioning fossil fuel industry workers, a Green New Deal could provide a good job to almost everyone who needed one. Along with doubling Social Security and a Basic Income, the Green Economy Reconstruction Program by itself would virtually eliminate poverty. Thus, a Green New Deal would be, for practical purposes, a Federal Job Guarantee program.

However, we want to do better than eliminate poverty, and we want everyone to have a comfortable standard of living. In addition, we don't want people to worry about losing their homes, etc., while they look for a job. Therefore, it will be necessary to set up a separate Federal Job Guarantee Program, that will guarantee that, at the very least, no one slides into poverty because they leave their job -- whether they leave their job voluntarily or involuntarily.

According to a report from The Center on Poverty and Inequality, "Nearly half (42.4 percent) of working people in our country make less than $15 per hour"

Let's say we wanted to move towards a society in which the lowest wage was $20 an hour, pushing almost everybody at least close to the middle class. The Green Economy Reconstruction Program would soak up all unemployment/underemployment, pushing firms to pay their workers more. If, in addition, we had a Federal Job Guarantee Program that employed up to 2 million people, at $20 per hour, assuming 20 people per million dollars, we would need $100 billion per year. These workers could do many thing which are underserved today: helping with care of the elderly and disabled, helping with environmental services in towns and cities that the CCC did not provide, such as energy audits on buildings, providing cultural services like public art, theater and writing that the Works Progress Administration supported in the original New Deal.