UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME IS NO PANACEA FOR US – AND LABOUR SHOULDN’T BACK IT -SONIA SODHA
OPINION :
There aren’t many ideas that unite trade unionists, the libertarian right, the green movement, and the Silicon Valley tech scene . But that’s the rainbow alliance backing a universal basic income, a centuries-old idea posited as the solution to a range of 21st-century problems. Is its surprising coalition of bedfellows a sign of an idea whose time has at last resoundingly come – or a symptom of a catch-all, superficial fix in search of a problem?
Universal basic income, sometimes called a citizens’ income, is the idea
that the state should pay every adult citizen a regular, modest income. It is a
no-strings payment, so unlike benefits currently available to people of working
age, it is not means tested. You get it regardless of whether you have a job,
are looking for work, or whether you are even willing to work.
A basic income has long counted on support from the political fringes. It
has appealed to radical feminists and greens frustrated by capitalist failure
to properly value non-monetary work, such as care. The libertarian right
embraces it as an opportunity to roll back the bureaucracy of the state,
replacing public services with a simple, regular cash payment, to be spent as
people wish.
But the real reason for basic income’s unlikely elevation to idea of the
moment is the growing chorus of thinkers who seem to believe the modern economy
can’t function without it. Tech utopians talk up the rise of robots and the
development of artificial intelligence, which they say will leave less work to
go round. They argue that this is the perfect opportunity to embrace a four-day
working week and top everyone up with a basic income payment.
Labour market dystopians, on the other hand, rightly point to growing
insecurity in the low-paid labour market and the millennials bouncing from gig
to gig, never quite pinning down the security of a permanent contract. For
them, a basic income is the poverty backstop that could help people cope with
this brave new world.
Ken Loachian welfare critics, meanwhile, denounce today’s convoluted
benefits system, worlds away from the contributory, insurance-based system of
the past. It has become overloaded with sanctions as politicians compete to
become ever more punitive to demonstrate there’s no such thing as something for
nothing. So people who have been laid off find themselves pushed further into
hardship after having their benefits docked for reasons outside their control.
Wouldn’t it be easier to eradicate that inhumane, overbearing complexity, and
replace it with something that gives people more breathing room to find the
right job?
But, like so many ideas overstretched to become the answer to all
problems, a basic income falls short on all of the above. If we could be bothered,
we could fix the caring issue simply by increasing the generosity of the stingy
state benefits paid to those who care full-time for older people or adults with
disabilities. If we were so inclined, we could get rid of punitive benefit
sanctions and replace them with a welfare-to-work system that puts much more
emphasis on training and support for people to find the job that is right for
them, not the first that comes along.
But it is in its most ambitious and radical incarnations that basic
income runs aground. People have been predicting the end of work for a long
time. Guess what: whether they count themselves utopian or dystopian, they have
always been proved wrong. The wheel, the loom, the washing machine, the PC: as
innovation after innovation has replaced some forms of human labour, the steady
march of progress has replaced that labour with something else.
It’s tempting to think our inventions are more transformative than those
of our ancestors. But it’s much more likely that, as in the past, technology
will radically reshape the world of work without reducing its sum total. That’s
partly because the idea that there is a set amount of paid work to be done is
an error, which economists call the “lump of labour fallacy”. In fact, the
richer we get, the more cash we have to spend – creating more demand and more
jobs.
None of this should take away from the fact that we have some serious
challenges ahead. The idea that the labour market is being reshaped rather than
shrunk won’t be very comforting to taxi drivers losing their jobs to
self-driving cars and finding they lack the skills for the new ones being
created. But paying people a meagre basic income won’t help: we know from
deindustrialisation in the past that leaving people who get laid off languishing
on long-term benefits wreaks untold damage on working lives curtailed decades
too early.
Britain has also always had too many low-skill, low-paid jobs offering
poor prospects of progression. That should seriously worry us, particularly in
the light of new research that suggests having a low-paid, stressful job is
even worse for your mental health than unemployment.
Far from robots stealing jobs, the reality of today’s economy is that
many companies are underinvesting in technology, suppressing productivity
growth. In some sectors, labour is so cheap and easily exploitable it doesn’t
make sense to modernise – for instance, Leicester’s garment industry is still
heavily reliant on old-fashioned sweatshop models. In sectors such as parcel
delivery and logistics, technology itself is being used to turn workers into
quasi-robots. Wrist-based devices measure routes workers take round the
warehouse or delivery rounds to check them for speed and efficiency, and track
them right down to how long they take for toilet breaks.
The answer cannot be to accept this sorry state of affairs and try to
patch things up with a basic income. It must be to address the fundamental
power imbalances that allow employers to shift risk on to their employees by
forcing them to become self-employed contractors, or refusing to pay them for
breaks. And to develop long-term solutions for improving the quality of work.
You can see the attractions of a basic income for Silicon Valley. Firms
such as Uber, whose drivers are classified as self-employed “partners” rely on
this risk-shift model. Even as Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, heaps
praise on a basic income, the tech giant does all in its legal power to avoid
tax and dodge paying its fair share towards the social infrastructure it relies
on. The left must not allow itself to be seduced. A basic income is a
distraction from these core issues of economic power; a radical-sounding excuse
to look the other way from the less glamorous, more complex question of how to
ensure labour market rights are properly enforced. Accepting a deterioration in
employment rights and working conditions in exchange for a basic income could
be dangerously counterproductive.
The tax credits that function as income top-ups for people in low-paid
work have steadily been eroded by Conservative chancellors over eight years.
Labour rights are more future proof: it’s impossible to imagine the government
being able to cut statutory maternity leave, the minimum wage or limits on the
working week without a much tougher fight – although if they are not properly
enforced these rights can end up meaning little in practice for workers with
unscrupulous employers.
The left will have to pick its battles. It must focus on winning the
right to a decently paid job for all, not sell out by extolling a basic income
as a panacea for the ills of the modern labour market. It must choose the fight
for power, not the fight for a dribble of cash.
• Sonia Sodha is chief leader
writer at the Observer
Source The Guardian
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