The third annual UBI Taiwan international summit will be held in Taipei on March 16, 2019. This year’s theme is “Key Trends of the Next Generation,” focusing on technological development as well as growing income inequality and how these trends intersect with basic income.
Asia has progressed rapidly in the global basic income movement, led by India which has shown intense political interest in implementing policies containing aspects of basic income.
Sarath Davala, Basic Income Earth Network’s Vice Chair, will join the conference to discuss these developments and more in his keynote speech “Basic Income is the Foundation of A Caring Society.”
“This is the third consecutive year that UBI Taiwan is organizing a regional Basic Income Conference. UBI Taiwan is perhaps the only national level basic income group that organizes annual conferences. That is a demonstration of a robust movement, the strength of its leadership and their commitment to the idea of basic income,” Davala said.
Ryan Engen, an Economic Officer at the American Institute in Taiwan, America’s unofficial representative entity in Taiwan, will deliver the opening remarks discussing how digital transformations should make global economies consider updates to our social security systems.
Guy Standing, the co-founder of BIEN, Andrew Yang, the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, and Peter Knight, the former World Bank economist, will join via pre-recorded messages.
This year, there will be a focus on bringing in academics and opinion makers from across Taiwan. Professors from Taiwan’s premier universities, National Taiwan University and National Chengchi University, as well as influential Taiwanese media figures, will address the conference.
The Critical Language Scholarship’s (CLS) Alumni Development Fund (ADF) provided a grant to help fund the conference and related events. CLS is a language program under the U.S. State Department.
James Davis, the former Field Research Director for UBI Taiwan and one of the project recipients for the ADF grant, said the conference demonstrates UBI Taiwan’s commitment to pushing this discussion in Asia and around the world.
“UBI Taiwan is here to change everything. We are not content with a society where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, as the wages of the working class fall year after year,” Davis said.
Davala has participated in every conference since it began in 2017.
“I am proud to be a regular participant of these conferences. I wish UBI Taiwan team success for this conference. With their kind of energy and dedication to basic income, I am sure one-day UBI will be a reality in Taiwan,” Davala said.
Brian Anderson, a senior at Western Kentucky University and also a recipient of the ADF grant, said this conference will help create academic connections between Taiwan and the United States.
“The push for UBI deserves international support and my project seeks to promote mutual understanding of shared interests between Taiwanese and American citizens,” Anderson said.
For Davis, society’s “inadequate” support for parents and caregivers as well as the financial difficulties faced by students illustrate the reasons why Taiwan should consider a basic income.
“UBI is the future. And UBI Taiwan is here to deliver,” Davis said.
Charles Eisenstein. Picture credit to: Resilience.
Charles Eisenstein, author, thinker and true believer that a better world is possible, has spoken his mind about Unconditional Basic Income (UBI). For that purpose, he has recorded this short video.
In his view, UBI stands as a threat for the current work marketplace, since people (getting a UBI) would not easily do “degrading, dangerous work”, or that “no one would do it for very long, or very much…unless you paid them to do it”. He goes as far as to say that UBI would “change the whole structure of the economy”, since people would no longer submit to terrifying work conditions, or under-poverty line salaries, just in order to survive. With UBI, Eisenstein reasons, “people wouldn’t be trapped in those things”. In fact, he continues, today’s economy is locked in with millions of people undergoing degrading work.
People want to do things, people have dreams, Eisenstein says. But in this present-day economy, people’s wants, needs and dreams are trampled on constantly by the relentless speed and coldness of “survival”. So, he questions affluent people: “Do you want your affluence to be built of the humiliation of other people?”. At the bottom of his argument, Eisenstein points to “force”: work is only degrading when people are forced to do it. And so UBI would simply revolutionize capitalism, since people would no longer be forced – by means of a “survival threat” – into labour, but gain enough freedom to pursue their dreams and passions.
Anna, 29 – Participant in the HartzPlus experiment in Berlin, Germany
The HartzPlus experiment is starting in Germany this month. Previously summarized, the experiment will involve 250 welfare beneficiaries, subject to the Hartz IV welfare scheme. For three years, the randomly selected participants will receive 416 €/month, whether they comply with the Hartz IV conditions or not. For comparison purposes, the minimum wage in Germany is around 1500 €/month, and the poverty line stands at approximately 1100 €/month. So, just like the recent experiment in Finland, this is an test which on objective terms cannot be said to be reproducing a “basic” income, in the sense of providing the basic for achieving a minimum dignified standard of living (in this case, in Germany). Like in Finland, it is mainly testing the effects of introducing an unconditional element on the income of a group of people, for a limited period of time.
Other propositions have been vocalized in Germany, mainly in response or even as an expression of protest against the Hartz IV, enforced in the country since 2003. One of such voices has been Berlin Mayor Michael Müller, a long time Social Democratic Party (SPD) official. However, what Müller is defending, in essence, is a job guarantee, over a basic income. Beneath the “basic income based on solidarity” concept lies a fundamental distrust in Berlin’s citizens: that the latter must be coerced into municipal or social service jobs, in exchange for their “basic income” (a gross amount or around 1500 €/month). However, the proposition has been popular in Germany for a long time, with the Social Democratic Party and the Left Party having subsidized public employment in Berlin between 2002 and 2011.
While politicians and voter’s stomach for Hartz IV is running dry, after more than 15 years of enforcement, clear justification for a UBI kind of policy still seems to be lacking on the public arena. For instance, funding a basic income is still publicly presented as value of basic income times number of recipients which, of course, leads to prohibitive costs. This comes at a time when ever more studies demonstrate that providing a basic income to citizens can cost much less than that to the State on a net basis, or it can even be calibrated in such a way as to be cost neutral (by applying changes to social security schemes and taxation).
Hilmar Schneider, an economist for the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, actually thinks that creating a financial floor for poor people means spending money on all the population. Internally, he is also thinking in a “value of basic income times number of recipients” mentality, not understanding the income transfer mechanism inherent in basic income implementation. According to him, present day low paid jobs will become less attractive, which sounds reasonable to assume, since most people only accept those jobs because they are permanently threatened with destitution. What might not be so reasonable to assume, however, is to think that it may lead to price increases, and a general downward trend in income for many people. If people can accumulate a basic income with whatever income they can get from paid work, within a properly setup tax structure which incorporates basic income at its core, a rise in poverty is surely questionable.
The Morung Express newspaper has interviewed the sole Sikkim MP at Lok Sabha (central parliament in India), Prem Das Rai. On the 17th of February, excerpts of that interview were posted, where Rai clearly states that introducing a universal basic income (UBI) in the state “is a leap of faith”. To him, it is a trust issue, when critics point out that a UBI kind of policy may turn people lazy. In reply, he says that “lazy people will be lazy people whether they get money or not”.
Rai does not conceive UBI as a grant, or a subsidy, but an income. That means that the purpose is not to have UBI seen as a hand-out, but a human right. “UBI is for every citizen of Sikkim, all Sikkimese people”. This contrasts with the recent announcements of both national opposition party Congress and government Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which Rai considers to be targeted schemes (Congress aims at the “poor” and the BJP at “poor farmers”) and in reaction to the agrarian crisis ravaging the country.
According to Rai, Sikkim state is not proposing basic income as a reaction to some urgent crisis, but as a way to look “ahead and changing the mindset of the youth”. Over that new mindset, and knowing they will have a guaranteed influx of money every month, regardless of their personal situation, people will naturally behave differently and tend to make better choices in life. That is Rai’s belief, anyway.
As for funding, and instead of speaking about taxes, Rai responds that Sikkim state is rich in resources, such as “hydropower, tourism, organic farming and pharmaceutical companies”, as well as “educational facilities”, and so will find the funds to cover for basic income, from within these several sources. The specific form this funding will be performed, however, is still unclear.
On Raul Ghandi’s Congress party promise to implement a kind of basic income all across India (conceived as a negative income tax), if it gets elected in May, Rai responds that Sikkim is the example to follow, devaluing Ghandi’s initiave. Rai sees basic income in India more as a growing number of regional initiatives, rather than a central idea, implemented nationally.
The postdoctoral fellow will carry out extensive research on basic income experiments, study ongoing pilot designs, review the findings of cash-based programs throughout the world, culminating in a comprehensive report Universal Basic Income: Learning from the Global Evidence Base, which is to be launched at an international event in 2020.
Applicants should have research interests and experience in universal basic income or related cash transfer programs, poverty eradication, or social and economic inequality, and must hold a PhD in economics, political science, public policy, psychology, sociology, or related fields.
Established in February 2017, the Basic Income Lab (BIL) promotes research on the design, implementation, and impact of basic income and related policies, and stimulates discussion on the topic between scholars, policymakers, nonprofit organizations, think tanks, and others.
BIL has collaborated with the National League of Cities to create the toolkit Basic Income In Cities: A Guide to City Experiments and Pilot Projects. At present, BIL is preparing to launch an online platform that will provide a detailed visual representation of existing research on basic income.
Chamberlain’s book explores universal basic income (UBI), which he calls unconditional basic income, as a potential step on the way from a “work society,” in which individual gainful employment is placed at the center of citizenship and community membership, to a post-work community in which the wellbeing of others is valued over individual achievements. Undoing Work, Rethinking Community focuses primarily on the UK and the US, moving through a detailed discussion of the place of work in contemporary life and politics, as well as more recent changes that have witnessed a gradual erosion of worker’s rights and stability, contending that the current overvaluation of work undermines freedom, equality, and justice. It then outlines a potential role for UBI in Chamberlain’s vision of the transition away from the work society, along with guidance for UBI advocates who share similar priorities with regard to shifting the conversation from its focus on encouraging employment. Finally, it sketches the theoretical beginnings of a “post-work” community.
Employment in Politics and the Meaning of Citizenship
Chamberlain begins by touching on the centrality of work and employment as a right and citizen’s obligation to the campaign rhetoric on both sides of the US 2016 election. Beyond America, he also points out 2011 UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s focus on employment as a solution to riots through the words “work is at the heart of our society.” In his very first pages, Chamberlain outlines his central contention: that citizenship and social participation are conditional upon employment and that those who are not able (or do not desire) to pursue employment for any reason, be it ability, other priorities or means of subsistence, family responsibilities, etc., are marginalized and configured as social pariahs or “freeloaders” rather than good citizens. In essence, he argues that society itself is currently understood to be the product of collective labour, and thus the work society values work ethic, the independence it permits, and the full citizenship or social participation made possible by said independence.
Interestingly, Chamberlain traces a brief history of types of “dependence” that used to be considered socially permissible or positive (that of a wife, for example, or the elderly) but have become more and more suspect, such that one must demonstrate the reason for one’s dependence (i.e., in the case of pregnancy, disability, or other inability to work) or show that one has paid one’s dues (in the case of the elderly) or is preparing oneself for employment (in the case of youth in school).
Undoing Work outlines the roots of the work society in history and political theory and examines several of the key arguments that connect work to citizenship. For example, the idea that individuals exist outside of society but collectively create society with their labour implies, in turn, that a lack of gainful employment is necessarily anti-social. This can be tied to a kind of apocalyptic, chaotic rhetoric, saying that unemployment will lead to social unrest and disintegration (as in David Cameron’s focus on employment in response to social unrest).
Studio portrait of James Chamberlain
(photo by Beth Wynn / Mississippi State University)
The “Work Society” Limits Freedom and Demands Increasing Flexibility
What is the problem with this social emphasis on everyone “pulling their weight”? Chamberlain argues that it limits the freedom to act according to one’s own “values, needs, and desires,” (10) when a person needs to take any or all employment available. Freedom is also limited when all of one’s time is occupied by making money with no opportunity to spend time on activities that don’t have a price put upon them. Furthermore, the increase in information technology has begun to dissolve the boundaries between work and the remainder of life. Importantly, restrictions to freedom do not fall equally upon a population, with regard to access to greater varieties and qualities of employment: “One can understand justice as equality of freedom or, more specifically, the equal ability of all members of society in ways that reflect their own ends” (12).
In his third chapter, Chamberlain discusses the idea of increasing flexibility of employment, from Reagan and Thatcher to the gig economy and the increase in remote work. Flexibility is a double-edged sword. Half of it entails deregulation, erosion of support for workers, increased precarity in terms of employment and compensation, dissolution of work–life boundaries, lack of collective bargaining, and other employer-friendly policies. Many qualities of flexibility can also be worker-friendly, however: flexible scheduling and the dissolution of work–life boundaries may allow a person to work from home or on their own time, or it may ask them to devote significant quantities of their life to work without any additional compensation. At least there are solutions available to offer support to those remote working away from the office so that they can receive additional training and mentorship from wherever they may be and still progress in their careers. Without the support, those working from home may quickly find themselves without motivation and disassociated from their work colleagues. Companies have begun to look at ways to combat this by finding virtual team building activities such as the ones you can see at BreakoutIQ. This is in the hopes of instilling a sense of comradeship between co-workers.
UBI: Undoing or Supporting Employment?
If our jobs are becoming increasingly flexible and precarious, allowing us to participate socially in a complete manner and support ourselves as independent citizens less and less, then UBI is one way to fill that gap and allow people to continue to find meaningful employment: however, it is just this argument for UBI that Chamberlain finds suspect. In Undoing Work, UBI is established as a partial solution to many of the aforementioned issues, a very important stop-gap permitting what he claims is actually required, which is to dismantle the work society and the social value of employment.
Chamberlain identifies an ideological disjuncture within the UBI movement, between advocates who say that UBI will support employment and advocates who contend that supporting employment is beside the point. This is echoed in the works reviewed by BIEN, as emerging UBI research and economic simulations define different metrics for success, and many of them are focused on employment rates rather than health indicators or other measurements associated solely with wellbeing. Undoing Work places UBI proponents on a spectrum from a full commitment to the work society to the preference for freedom from employment/right and ability to refuse employment. However, Chamberlain acknowledges that some who have argued for UBI’s positive impact on employment rates have done so for the sake of expediency. In other words, supporting a truly Unconditional BI may necessarily be politically precarious due to its promise to give “something for nothing.”
Chamberlain then contends that UBI’s implementation and effects depend upon the ideologies of social participation and citizenship by which it is surrounded. Whether or not a UBI recipient lives in Chamberlain’s “work society” will have a significant impact on a basic income’s ability to transform their lives for the better.
To highlight his point, Chamberlain contrasts UBI with workfare/unemployment and means-tested benefits, examining the differences between the administrative goal of re-integrating a person into the workforce and UBI. An implementation of the latter without a corresponding ideological shift may simply result in social forces creating the same stigmas against and marginalization of those who appear not to be contributing in a normative manner. In other words, without a cultural change in the value of work, people receiving UBI will still feel the pressure to take jobs regardless of interest or aptitude. From the perspective of a reader perennially curious about the intercultural differences in UBI implementation around the world, this is an interesting and important point, though it is beyond this book’s purview to speculate about the international differences that might be seen in UBI implementation depending on each country or region’s ideological variations.
A more radical implementation of UBI may in fact encourage people to shape new “purposes,” voluntary or collectively informed but not necessarily rewarded or validated by a wage. Indeed, if work is as essential to a valuable and meaningful life as its proponents suggest, Chamberlain suggests that it is unlikely that UBI recipients (i.e., all of us) will simply give up any kind of occupation or responsibility.
The Post-Work Society
The final chapters of the book examine visions of a post-work society. Chamberlain suggests that many contemporary visions of post-capitalism (e.g., André Gorz’s work, or Hardt and Negri’s Empire) have not in fact theorized a real “post-work” society because they remain centred upon community-oriented production and reproduction: they still see the common/society as produced by some form of work or labour, and participation in their post-capitalist models is still frequently predicated upon social contribution conceptualized as labour.
A real post-work society, argues Chamberlain, means that membership in one’s community must not be connected to work (paid or unpaid). Rather, he suggests a vision of community that is predicated upon concern for the wellbeing of others but does not then turn around and stigmatize or marginalize community members who do not appear to share similar concerns.
One key part of this is that we should not view individuals as things that can be separated from a community or society (or accordingly marginalized as “non-contributors”). Rather, a community is in its fundamental form made up of interconnected relationships that have little to do with labour.
Chamberlain argues that the tendency to think about this kind of community as encouraging “freeloading” is an intuitive response from those of us who have grown up valuing employment so highly. Accordingly, Chamberlain provides some insightful advice for UBI advocates, suggesting that arguments for UBI should be focused on collective well-being rather than employment potential, shaped in a way that does not encourage critics to jump straight to criticisms about giving “something for nothing.”
Chamberlain’s vision for a post-work society is outlined in terms of what it must not be. The lack of a fuller picture is understandable given the magnitude, impossibility, and perhaps unsuitability of attempting this task theoretically (a challenge he acknowledges). Despite this, the last few pages of the book cite reasons for hope of a transition: the prevalence of conversations about UBI, minimum wage movements, and economic cooperatives, as some examples.
A reader may wonder if none of the smaller communities established within and regardless of political boundaries, including economic or social cooperatives, faith-based communities, secular or intentional communities, families, or Indigenous or ethnicity-based communities, already value interpersonal wellbeing more highly than labour and, accordingly, exhibit unique social economies. While it is sensibly out of the book’s scope to conduct an international comparison of work ideologies, Chamberlain’s focus on national discourse feels relevant and interesting but also general and totalizing, spoken from the “voice” of the work society without exploring the diversity that may be occurring within a nation or testing its borders on local scales. However, overall, Chamberlain’s Undoing Work, Rethinking Community is a considered and valuable critique of the role of employment in life, politics, and UBI policy and discourse. His discussion of increasing precarity, demand for flexibility, and the lack of freedom that employment often delivers despite independence’s promises to the contrary will strike home for many readers.
