by Hannah Trippier | Jul 31, 2018 | News, Research
The Welfare Conditionality (WelCond) project recently released a report on how people receiving benefits in the UK experience welfare conditionality within a social security system. Welfare conditionality is where a person’s eligibility for benefits is dependent on meeting certain requirements, for example attending regular interviews, which will be taken away if a person does not meet the latter.
The study used longitudinal qualitative methodology to investigate the experience of people receiving welfare in the UK and the changes in their behaviour over time. Over five years, from 2013-2018, the study conducted 1082 qualitative longitudinal interviews with 481 people receiving welfare (including jobseekers, single parents, migrants, homeless people, and offenders who have left the judicial system), 52 semi-structured interviews with policy stakeholders and 27 focus groups with frontline welfare practitioners.
Longitudinal qualitative methodology enables researchers to gain an insight into people’s experience of and perspectives on welfare conditionality over a period of time. However, qualitative research does not enable the assessment of the effectiveness of welfare conditionality intervention on relevant outcomes (such as the motivation to work). Accordingly, the results of the study cannot be taken to show the effectiveness of welfare conditionality as an intervention but can be used to gain a greater understanding of the potential benefits and harms of this practice.
The results of the study indicated that benefit sanctions do little to enhance people’s motivation to prepare for, seek, or enter paid work. On the contrary, in some cases the imposition of benefits sanctions led to feelings of reduced motivation and disengagement with the social security system. Welfare conditionality was viewed to be largely ineffective in facilitating people’s entry into paid labour market or in sustaining employment. Participants often reported a lack of change or sustained change in employment status, where they shifted between short-term, insecure, and low paid jobs, and periods of receiving benefits.
Additionally, welfare conditionality and benefit sanctions were reported to be connected to adverse outcomes such as poverty, increased reliance on charitable providers and informal support networks, increased debt and loss of tenancy, etc. People dealing with high debts may have to go for a rental property after losing their home and take the assistance of a letting agents to find a property at a reasonable rate. Welfare conditionality can also be associated with negative health outcomes, including fear, anxiety, psychological distress, and exacerbating existing health conditions, particularly in people with mental health issues.
The study also indicated that the current support provided often did not help people looking for work and that the provision of personalised, holistic support could be more effective in helping people to gain and retain employment. This was noted as a potential facilitator to increase motivation to prepare for, seek and enter work, and to enable people to overcome personal and structural barriers to work.
The authors of the study concluded that the perceived benefits of welfare conditionality to increase motivation to work did not outweigh the potential drawbacks and recommended a trial of conditionality-free benefits for those looking for work and the removal of benefit sanctions for people receiving incapacity benefit for existing health conditions. As an alternative to welfare conditionality, the authors recommended that personalised, holistic employment support should be given to help people enter the job market.
More information at:
Welfare Conditionality, “Final findings report – Welfare Conditionality Report 2013-2018“, Welfare Conditionality, June 2018
by Jurgen De Wispelaere | Jul 28, 2018 | News
The 2018 BIEN Congress, held in Tampere on 24-26 August, has released its revised conference program. In addition to a wide variety of panels and papers covering recent academic and policy discussions on basic income, the program features a series of exciting plenary speakers, including a plenary roundtable on basic income experiments and an opening address by Tarja Halonen, the former President of Finland.
For the first time in the history of BIEN congresses, on the 24th and 25th of August, the Tampere congress also hosts Basic Income in Motion, a film festival featuring more than a dozen films and documentaries on basic income running alongside the congress. Participants are also invited to participate in the Nordic Day on the 23rd of August and discuss recent advances in basic income with members of the different Nordic basic income networks, plus a public lecture by Rutger Bregman to promote the Finnish translation of his bestseller Utopia for Realists.
All events will take place on the main campus of the University of Tampere and are held in English.
The 5th of August deadline for registration is approaching fast! Don’t miss out and register as soon as possible and join us in Finland at the end of the August!
For questions, contact us at biencongress2018@gmail.com
Jurgen De Wispelaere, Pertti Koistinen and Roosa Eriksson
(on behalf of the BIEN2018 LOC)
by Andre Coelho | Jul 27, 2018 | News
Barack Obama. Credit to: CNBC.
Despite having failed to actually endorse basic income, for the second time, international media is portraying Barack Obama as a supporter. For instance, the Trumpet, a news depot that “seeks to show how current events are fulfilling the biblically prophesied description”, depicts Obama as a hard-core socialist, sending him an indirect message saying that “the Bible warns against a get-something-for-nothing mentality”. However, and apparently, being knowledgeable in clerical issues and having served in the Church of England ministry, hasn’t stopped Dr. Malcolm Torry from supporting and studying in detail the basic income policy.
Another online news service, the Independent Sentinel, which announces it “report[s] the news the media won’t”, blatantly calls Obama a communist. A communist who has “saddled us [in the United States] with the far-left system of healthcare which has been an expensive and failed experiment”. Considering the nature of the privatized-insurance based healthcare system in the US, Sweden’s healthcare could be called an extreme-far-left successful case study. This news article joints Barack Obama and former Greek minister Yanis Varoufakis as unrepented communists who promote basic income, a policy under which “people become enslaved to the State”.
The Mic reports the same event on a soberer tint. However, its post starts out by pointing that Obama “come[s] out in support of an economic policy that is far to the left of anything being proposed by most sitting U.S. politicians”. The writer and basic income Scott Santens once claimed that basic income was neither left or right (it’s forward), but apparently polarized politics is still very much popular in the US.
Quartz Africa reduces the focus on Obama’s reference to basic income itself, to highlight his speech on inequality, and his views on what should be the solution to humanity’s current crisis: an inclusive capitalism, “which protects collective bargaining, breaks up monopolies, enforces laws that root out corruption”. Unresolved remains Obama’s belief that “a job […] provides dignity and structure and a sense of place and a sense of purpose”, while saying in the same breath that “we’re gonna have to consider new ways of thinking about these problems, like universal income.”
In a CNCB article, on the other hand, a more cautious approach is taken concerning Obama, who is, arguably, a more fervent supporter of a job guarantee than a basic income. He his cited to have said that “the job of giving everybody work that is meaningful [will get] tougher, and we’re going to have to be more imaginative, […] to protect the economic security and the dignity that comes with a job”. The article also mentions Obama’s former vice-president Joe Biden, who basically supported that view integrally.
Whether former US President Barack Obama is a basic income supporter or not, it is rising to become one of the most debated issues in contemporary politics. Robert Reich, former President Clinton’s secretary of labor and ex-member of Obama’s transition advisory board, already looks at some sort of basic income policy as “inevitable”, along with tech moguls like Elon Musk. And that’s not only over the elite’s dome, it’s also among the average American citizen, whose support for the policy has been steadily increasing over the past few years, reaching almost half of the population according to recent polls.
More information at:
Karl Widerquist, “Obama speaks favorably about UBI but stops short of endorsing it (for the second time)”. Basic Income News, July 18th 2018
Andrew Miller, “Barack Obama Voices Support for a Universal Basic Income”, the Trumpet, July 19th 2018
S. Noble, “Barack Obama Promoted Universal Basic Income in South Africa”, the Independent Sentinel, July 18th 2018
A.P. Joyce, “Barack Obama signals support for a universal income”, Mic, July 17th 2018
Lynsey Chutel, “Barack Obama says the rich owe the world a huge debt”, Quartz Africa, July 17th 2018
Catherine Clifford, “Barack Obama suggests cash handouts be considered to address workforce challenges”, CNBC, July 18th 2018
André Coelho, “UNITED STATES: Joe Biden believes that jobs are the future, rather than basic income”, Basic Income News, September 23rd 2017
Catherine Clifford, “Ex-Labor Secretary: Some kind of cash handout ‘seems inevitable”, CNBC, July 13th 2018
André Coelho, “United States: American citizens support for UBI rises four times, compared to a decade ago”, Basic Income News, July 10th 2018
by Kate McFarland | Jul 24, 2018 | News
Alderman Ameya Pawar, one of fifty elected members of the City Council of Chicago, has introduced a resolution to convene a taskforce to investigate the implementation of a basic income trial in the city. According to the proposal set out in the resolution (which can be read in full here), the pilot project should provide 1000 families “with a minimum of $500/month, no strings attached,” with further details of the model to be established by the taskforce:
[W]e, the Members of the City Council, assembled this day on June 27, 2018[,] direct the Mayor’s office to empanel a Chicago Resilient Families Initiative taskforce to study Universal Basic Income and an Earned Income Tax Credit Modernization program.
The taskforce would carry out the following activities:
1. Create partnerships with city departments and external stakeholders, foundations, advocacy organizations, philanthropists, and leading public policy makers to launch a Universal Basic Income (UBI) Initiative in the City of Chicago.
This taskforce would be charged with developing a UBI model for 1000 families to be provided with a minimum of $500/month, no strings attached.
2. Scaling the City of Chicago’s Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) smoothing program to the same 1000 family cohort.
The EITC smoothing would advance payments on a monthly basis. In addition, the taskforce would study the creation of a Chicago-based Earned Income Tax Credit Program.
Note that, if payments are made on a family rather than individual basis, the policy will not technically constitute a basic income as defined by BIEN; however, since the money is to be given with “no string attached,” the trial would examine a policy much closer to a true basic income than any existing welfare policies in the US.
As quoted above, the resolution additionally proposes to restructure the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a tax refund available to low-income working Americans, for the families in the experimental sample so that they receive their the credit monthly instead of annually. This would not be the first time that Chicago has tested a “smoothing” of the EITC over the year: in 2015, Mayor Emanuel collaborated with a Chicago-based non-profit organization in conducting an experiment in which over 300 residents received their EITC payments only a quarterly basis.
Introduced in the 1970s, the EITC has generally been a popular program that enjoys cross-partisan support, and EITC expansion is sometimes viewed as a potential route to introduce a basic income in the US. At present, however, the tax credit is available only to those who have earned income, is means-tested, and primarily benefits parents (e.g., this year, example, single parents of one child are eligible to receive up to $3,400 if their incomes fall under $39,617, while individuals with no children may receive only up to $510 for the year, and only if they earn less than $15,010).
Pawar has introduced the resolution out of concern about existing poverty and economic insecurity in Chicago and the US as well as the threat of additional job loss to automation.
Alderman Ameya Pawar, CC-BY-3.0 Chi Hack Night
Is Basic Income on the Horizon in Chicago?
After an article about Pawar’s resolution appeared in The Intercept on July 16, a torrent of articles appeared in the popular media, often with headlines suggesting that Chicago is on the verge of testing–or even implementing–a universal basic income. In fact, many hurdles remain to be surmounted before even a pilot can be launched.
When introduced in June, Pawar’s resolution received support from 36 co-sponsors in the Chicago City Council. Before the proposed taskforce is convened, however, it still must be approved by official vote of the council, in addition to the support of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Moreover, even if the taskforce is established, it will confront the task of not only designing but also fundraising for a basic income pilot project.
In interviews and social media, Pawar has commented on his inspiration from the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED), a trial of a $500 monthly guaranteed income that has been financed entirely by private donors. Notably, SEED received a $1 million seed grant (pun noted) from the Economic Security Project (ESP), which was launched in 2016 by basic income advocates including Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes for the purpose of funding projects related to unconditional cash transfers.
When asked about the funding issue during an interview on Chicago Tonight, Pawar noted that “there is a lot of support in the philanthropic community” for basic income initiatives, and briefly mentioned that he has also “had initial conversations” with ESP. Meanwhile, ESP’s communications director Saadia McConville has been quoted in the Chicago Sun Times as saying, “Are they going to be able to raise all that money philanthropically? That remains to be seen,” adding, “I can speak from experience in Stockton that it’s definitely not an easy task, but it is something that [donors] are interested in.” One impediment to philanthropic funding will be the sheer size of the trial proposed by Pawar. In contrast to his goal of 1000 families, the SEED project has set a target of at least 100 recipients for its equal-sized cash grants.
If the taskforce is created, the resolution specifies that it must deliver a report on the basic income and EITC experiment to the City Council by October 1, 2018. Thus, more information can be expected this autumn regarding a model for the experimental trial, as well as potential avenues for funding.
—
Post reviewed by Dawn Howard.
Cover Image CC-BY-2.0 Roman Boed
by Andre Coelho | Jul 21, 2018 | News
Jeff Bezos. Picture credit to: Evening Standard
Leonid Bershidsky, in this article, posted on the 18th of July, says that the best way to enact basic income is to “persuade tech billionaires to fund universal pay plans”. Motivated by Obama’s latest speech on Mandela’s (posthumous) 100th birthday, he suggests Obama should try have their attention – and money – to finance a basic income. Bershidsky is also convinced that a basic income cannot be financed through more taxes on the wealthy, which would only, according to him, “have a negative effect on growth and innovation”. There are those, however, who object this purpose of growth for its own sake, and propose other directions for society, such as degrowth.
Bershidsky affirms that others may be able to fund a basic income, such as Norway, but that is inconceivable in the United States. In the simplest of ways, he determines the cost of basic income as 327 million people times 500 US$/month, which equals around 2 trillion US$ per year. This kind of reasoning has been done many times before, but it lacks mathematical sense, as Scott Santens has already pointed out. Santens, on a more generous assumption for a basic income in the US, has suggested a gross cost of 3,3 trillion US$ per year. However, and most importantly, that is gross cost, not net cost. Net costs, according to him, can be zero, or even negative, if several reforms occur in welfare and the tax system, such as the elimination of welfare programs (turned obsolete due to their own means-tested nature), the abolition of invisible welfare benefits (those which benefit high earners), reforms in social security (turning pensions and disability benefits into supplements, as basic income is phased in), application of a carbon tax, a financial transaction tax, implementation of seigniorage reform, introduction of VAT (value-added tax) and LVT (land-value tax). To this could be added all the savings possible with the reduction or abolition of poverty, in health care, education and social security.
More information at:
Leonid Bershidsky, “Obama and Bezos Could Make Basic Income Work”, Bloomberg Opinion, July 18th 2018
Scott Santens, “How to Reform Welfare and Taxes to Provide Every American Citizen with a Basic Income”, Medium, June 5th 2017
by Andre Coelho | Jul 19, 2018 | News
Alexander Solovyev, Dimitriy Sarayev, Sergey Vladimirovich Khramov and Irina Soloveva
This Basic Income Conference moto was “Let’s win poverty in Russia together!”, and it took place in Moscow on the 26th of June 2018. It was organized by the combined efforts of the activist organization Basic Income Russia Tomorrow and the Moscow Communists (members of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation), which also invited leaders from the Trade Unions of Russia (Khramov Sergey Vladimirovich, General Labor Inspector) and the Russian Land Charity Fund (Baldanova Zinaida, Chairman of the Board of Trustees). The Conference main purpose was to debate around issues related with poverty, and how to solve it within the Russian context, while having present the best international examples on the subject.
The two organizing groups took the opportunity of this Conference to announce they would join forces and dedicate more time and effort, together, to reduce poverty in their country. Participants also seized the moment to criticize the government on its decision to raise the retirement age. This, according to them, will degrade the standard of living of all, increase the total number of poor people and spread social discontent across the whole country. A particular statement by the youth branch of the Basic Income Russia Tomorrow was made, as the organization is now determined to make reducing child poverty a priority for its activities. Finally, participants generally called out to all citizens, weather individually or in public or private organizations, to be alert and participate in a society-wide discussion about poverty and how it can be reduced in the 21st century, helping to build a fairer Russian society for the years to come.
The Conference was divided into four main themes: Poverty, Pensioners, Child Poverty and Labor Relations Reform.
Poverty, a theme delivered by Alexander Solovyev (council chairman of Basic Income Russia Tomorrow), was portrayed as destroyer of citizens and the State, degrading health, security, confidence, initiative and promoting the growth of crime. According to Solovyev, Russia has no right to have poor citizens, being so rich in natural resources. Therefore, he argued for the implementation of a US$ 500 per month individual and universal basic income, financed by the State’s revenue with natural resources, which should be shared with every citizen in the country.
Dimitriy Sarayev spoke about pensioners, who are in Russia, according to him, socially unprotected citizens. This situation is only made worse by the unilateral decision by the Russian government to raise the retirement age, which is thought to be justified by a need of this government to cut spending. Sarayev says this will also raise unemployment, as people unable to retire will stay on the jobs longer. According to him, raising the retirement age, if any, must be accompanied with proper healthcare and higher pensions, which is the exact opposite of what the government is doing.
As for child poverty, Irina Soloveva expressed her extreme concern about the high level of child poverty in Russia. She defends basic income as a necessity for children, first and foremost. Irina also refers the US$ 500 per month per person basic income allocation, as “a reliable foundation for their future life, [to] give children freedom and financial security, reduce the level of crime and corruption in the country, [which] will enable the country to develop”.
This Conference, and its focus on basic income as the single most important strategy to reduce poverty in the country, comes at a time when, for the first time in Russia, “public and political organizations began to unite to address the problem of poverty in Russia as a whole, including child poverty”. That is particularly important when in public discussions around poverty, in Russia, the term “child poverty” is completely omitted by state officials and the press.
