Lots of Americans have bullshit jobs, ones that have little tangible effect on the world but are nevertheless all-consuming, demanding that workers attend meetings throughout the day and chat on Slack after hours. These jobs proliferate in areas like finance, brand management, and even, I daresay, in journalism. But we’ve all got to eat, and for the majority of adult Americans, that means you need a job. Whether your job does any good for anyone else is another matter.

Even as bullshit jobs pile up, millions of Americans have no job at all, or they can only find part-time work. They’ve got to eat, too. They also need dignity, a sense that their lives matter. And dignity is another thing Americans get preeminently from work. When you have not had steady, good-paying work for several years, you might be drawn to a certain demagogic politician who promises to “bring back your jobs.”

If Democrats want a winning platform in the years ahead, Jeff Spross argues in the current issue of the journal Democracy, they ought to counter President Donald Trump’s rhetoric with a concrete offer to every American who wants dignity and a decent living: a federally funded job. Spross, an economics and business writer for The Week, makes a thorough case for a universal job guarantee, writing that “a job is not merely a delivery mechanism for income that can be replaced by an alternative source. It’s a fundamental way that people assert their dignity, stake their claim in society, and understand their mutual obligations to one another.”

This case has considerable merit, both economically and ethically, but it also reveals the flaws in our thinking about work as a moral enterprise. Ultimately, a universal basic income would do more to promote justice than a universal basic job. In fact, America would be better off if we divorced dignity from work altogether.

Spross proposes that someone with a full-time job in the federal program would work on infrastructure and community development projects and be paid $25,000, plus full benefits. The proposal has precedent, not only in the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, but in Argentina within the past decade. With jobs of last resort paying well above the current federal minimum wage, unemployment would drop to nothing and workers higher up the income ladder would gain tremendous bargaining power. The “dignity deficit” would disappear immediately.