by Kate McFarland | May 30, 2017 | News
Jamie Cooke, Head of RSA Scotland, will deliver a TEDx talk titled “Basic income – Scotland’s radical chance to lead the world (again)” in Glasgow on June 2, 2017.
TEDxGlasgow provides the following summary:
The welfare state, built for a different age, is crumbling.
As films such as ‘I, Daniel Blake’ have vividly demonstrated, a system designed to support and protect people at moments of vulnerability in their lives has been warped into one which uses sanctions to punish and control. As wages have stagnated, jobs have changed and incomes have been unpredictable, we have seen the growth of a section of society which Guy Standing calls the ‘Precariat’, living precarious, insecure lives. In turn, we have seen dangerous forces start to harness these insecurities, fuelling the rise of the far right in various parts of the world.
It’s a depressing picture, but there is hope – and Scotland, once again, has a chance to act as a beacon of enlightenment.
Glasgow is leading the way on developing basic income pilots, radical schemes to change the way we envisage work, income and our place in society; and in which we fundamentally shift the relationship between the citizen and state.
In this talk, Jamie will outline some of the positive paths we could take, and the role that basic income could play in creating a radically different Glasgow and Scotland.
For more information about the upcoming TEDxGlasgow event, including biographies and talk summaries of other speakers, see: https://www.tedxglasgow.com/speakers/.
Scotland is already becoming a hotbed of interest in basic income.
Earlier in the year, the City Council of Glasgow partnered with the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) to investigate designs for a basic income pilot program. At present, the Council and RSA are working on a study of the financial, administrative, and constitutional feasibility of a pilot in Glasgow. Workshops on the topics are planned in June and July 2017, with a report to follow in September.
Other regions in Scotland, including the council areas of Fife and North Ayrshire, are also exploring the possibility of basic income pilot programs.
A Scottish affiliate of BIEN, Citizen’s Basic Income Network Scotland, was launched in November 2016.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo: Sunrise over Glasgow, CC BY 2.0 john mcsporran
by Kate McFarland | May 20, 2017 | News
On Monday, May 22, 2017, the European Business Summit will hold a discussion of the European basic income debate as part of its annual event in Brussels, Belgium.
The hour-long session will feature two cofounders of BIEN–Philippe Van Parijs (Université catholique de Louvain) and Guy Standing (SOAS, University of London)–in addition to Olli Kangas (Kela), who is leading the research team behind Finland’s basic income experiment, and Mark Smith (Grenoble Ecole de Management). It will center on the question “The basic income debate is coming to a head in Europe, but is it really feasible?”
The discussion will be moderated by the Belgian freelance journalist Chris Burns, who has previously interviewed Standing about universal basic income and the precariat.
Now in its 17th year, the European Business Summit draws more than 2000 participants annually– business leaders, policymakers, researchers and academics, and others–to debate economic, social, and political issues facing Europe. This year, the conference will host 150 speakers over the course of two days. A full schedule is available here.
Photo: “European Business Summit” CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 European Wind Energy Association
by Kate McFarland | May 1, 2017 | Opinion
I have some ambivalence about the attempt to rebrand May Day as “Basic Income Day”. I have some ambivalence also, however, about the “modernization” of May Day as a time to demand higher wages for workers but give no attention to another historically important demand: the demand for reduced working hours. It was the latter, after all, that was at issue in the fateful demonstrations at Haymarket Square in May 1886.
That specific demand, of course, was the eight-hour workday. Over 130 years ago, it was widely accepted that society would not cease to function if workers clocked only eight hours per day. In light of such astronomical increases in productivity over the past 130 years, why, pray tell, is the eight-hour workday still considered standard? Why have demands for reduced work hours been all but absent from the US labor movement for over 80 years? Why has technological advancement not translated to increased leisure? Where is the 15-hour week prophesied by John Maynard Keynes? Where is this “fight for 15” campaign? It seems that a 40-hour work week has become all we can envision; we have lost our imagination.
I used to support a renewal of the demand for reduced work hours–and I still do. But I now recognize that it is insufficient, and insufficiently radical. Given the increasing prevalence of alternative job structures–short-term contract work, freelancing, self-employment–a mandatory reduction in work hours would have little or no effect on a large portion of the economy. And precarious employment, I believe, is something that we should not merely accept as inevitable but indeed welcome and embrace. Although not everyone’s cup of tea, perhaps, the freedom, flexibility, and variety is ideal for many of us–and might well be ideal for many more, if only they had a safety net sufficient to eliminate the constant financial anxiety that too often accompanies the lifestyle.
Rather than merely spending less time in traditional jobs (if they happen to be traditionally employed), individuals could–and should–have the option and opportunity to piece together a livelihood out of part-time and short-term work. Doing so with equanimity, however, requires the reliable financial floor that a basic income could provide. Moreover, a basic income could be considered a subsidy that effectively allows individuals to reduce work hours on their own terms.
Of course, a reduction in work hours is still desirable–and perhaps necessary–for traditional full-time jobs which, after all, still predominate in our society (and this might be joined to other reforms, such as legislation mandating that employers allow job-sharing or permit employees to trade income for time). However, with the rise of the “gig” or “1099” economy, an increasing number of individuals find their time not evenly and consistently distributed between work hours and non-work hours but, instead, erratically and inconsistently divided between times of employment (sometimes at multiple “gigs” at once) and times of underemployment or unemployment. For those of us in precariat, the most suitable analogue to work-hour reduction is the provision of an economic safety net that is not contingent on employment, such as a stakeholder grant or basic income, allowing us to seek fewer part-time jobs or short-term contracts.
In the end, then, insofar as May Day recognizes and commemorates not only the demonstrators at Haymarket Square but also the validity of their demand, it might just be that advocating a basic income is the best way to honor the spirit of the day.
Reviewed by Tyler Prochazka
by Kate McFarland | Apr 22, 2017 | News
BIEN co-founder and honorary co-president Guy Standing (also Professorial Research Associate at SOAS) has written a new introduction to basic income, Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen. The book has been published by Pelican Books, a well-known publisher of nonfiction works intended to be accessible to a broad audience in both content and cost.
As the publisher describes the book: “Guy Standing has been at the forefront of thought about Basic Income for the past thirty years, and in this book he covers in authoritative detail its effects on the economy, poverty, work and labour; dissects and disproves the standard arguments against Basic Income; explains what we can learn from pilots across the world and illustrates exactly why a Basic Income has now become such an urgent necessity.”
Commenting on Standing’s latest book, journalist Paul Mason states, “Guy Standing has pioneered our understanding of [basic income] — not just of the concept but of the challenges it is designed to meet: rapid automation and the emergence of a precarious workforce for whom wages derived from work will never be enough. As we move into an age where work and leisure become blurred, and work dissociated from incomes, Standing’s analysis is vital.”
Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen will be released on May 4, with a free launch event to be held at the London School of Economics (LSE) on May 8. The event will be chaired by Mike Savage of the LSE’s International Inequalities Institute.
Standing’s last book, The Corruption of Capitalism (July 2016), generated widespread global attention, as did his previous works on the precariat.
Reviewed by Cameron McLeod
Guy Standing photo, credit: Enno Schmidt.
by Kate McFarland | Feb 25, 2017 | News
BIEN co-founder Guy Standing is slated to speak at a student-led economics conference at the University of Glasgow on March 12.
The Glasgow Economic Forum (GEF) is an annual conference organized by students at the University of Glasgow, intended to encourage undergraduate economics students to learn more “outside of the textbooks.” The third GEF will be held March 11-12, 2017, with a focus on economic growth. According to its Eventbrite page, the 2017 GEF “sets out to explore a plurality of perspectives on whether growth constitutes a means or is an end in itself.”
The conference’s headline speakers include BIEN co-founder Guy Standing (Professorial Research Associate at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), who will speak on themes from his latest book, The Corruption of Capitalism (2016, BiteBack), wherein he argues that “rentier capitalism” has broken down and needs to be replaced with an economic system centered on a basic income.
Other headline speakers include Professor Leszek Balcerowicz (former Finance Minister for Poland and the former President of the National Bank of Poland) and John Weeks (Professor Emeritus of SOAS).
According to the GEF’s website, the two previous conferences drew nearly 200 attendees from across Europe, including student groups from universities throughout the UK. Previous meetings focused on the global financial crisis of 2007-08 and its impact.
Guy Standing (credit: Enno Schmidt)
For Standing, the GEF meeting comes amid a busy week.
On March 9, he will meet ambassadors and officials of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to discuss basic income and the precariat. On March 10, he is scheduled to speak about The Corruption of Capitalism at the Headstrong Club in Lewes, UK, a debate and discussion venue that describes itself as promoting “high-quality discussion and debate on a wide range of topics” at special ticketed events. On March 11, he will meet with the National Union of Journalists in London to talk about the precariat. Then on March 13, the day after the GEF talk, Standing will present themes from this new book at a Marx Research Seminar at the University of Lincoln.
Reviewed by Cameron McLeod
University of Glasgow photo CC BY-SA 2.0 Alvin Leong
