The contributors to this edited collection argue that a flexible Job Guarantee program able to react to an economy's fluctuating need for work would stabilize the labour standard, the value of employment in relation to money. During economic downturns, the program would expand to provide more public sector jobs in response to private-sector layoffs. It would then contract when economic growth offered private sector employment opportunities. This flexible full-employment program would create a balanced, perpetually active labor force, providing the macroeconomic stability necessary to define a functioning labor standard. Just as the gold standard measured the worth of money against gold reserves, John Milton Keynes argued, so a labour standard ought to measure the value of money in terms of its labour equivalent. However, he failed to account for the fact that, unlike a gold standard, a labour standard does not have any kind of surety that money will continue to match its value in paid work overtime. Together, the contributors argue that full employment would provide this missing security and allow authorities to define the value equivalencies of money and labour, the way that money once represented its exact equivalent in gold.