by BICN | Jul 31, 2013 | News
[July 26, 2013 – The Basic Income Canada Network / Reseau Canadien Pour Le Revenu Garanti]
BICN
The Basic Income Canada Network / Reseau Canadien Pour Le Revenu Garanti (BICN) has announced some of the keynote speakers for the Fifteenth Congress of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). BIEN has held a Congress every second year since 1986.
The 2014 congress will take place at the McGill Faculty of Law in Montreal, Quebec from June 26th to June 29th, 2014. The theme of the 2014 BIEN Congress is “Re-democratizing the Economy”. The congress aims to engage BIEN’s affiliate networks and the public in a sustained discussion about the role of a basic income guarantee in re-democratizing the economy, nationally and globally.
The following speakers have so far agreed to join the discussion:
- Roberto Gargarella, Professor at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Argentina and Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at University College London, author of The Legal Foundation of Inequality: Constitutionalism in the Americas, 1776-1860 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Latin American Constitutionalism,1810-2010: The Engine Room of the Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2013).
- Renana Jhabvala, President of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), Bharat, India, and author of The Idea of Work (Indian Academy For Self Employed Women, 2012) and Social Income and Insecurity: A Study in Gujarat (Routledge, 2010)
- Linda McQuaig, Journalist, columnist, social critic, and best-selling author of, most recently, The Trouble with Billionaires (Viking Canada, 2010) and Billionaires’ Ball: Gluttony and Hubris in an Age of Epic Inequality (Beacon Press, 2012)
BICN
- Guy Standing, Professor in Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London andCo-President, Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), author of Work After Globalization: Building Occupational Citizenship (Edward Elgar, 2009) and The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (Bloomsbury, 2011)
The Congress will also include the 2014 General Assembly meeting of BIEN. The call for papers will be announced early in the fall of 2013. Updates about the congress can be obtained from the Canadian network’s website at: https://biencanada.ca/BIEN2014_Congress.html.
See also BIEN’s website: https://basicincome.org
by Yannick Vanderborght | Jun 10, 2013 | Opinion
Marina P. Nóbrega – for the Municipal Council for the Citizen’s Basic Income, Santo Antonio do Pinhal, SP, Brazil
Humanity has to rescue the human solidarity that used to pervade tribal societies where wealthy was evenly shared. In our days money has to be used to that effect as great social thinkers have been preaching. In Brazil, President Lula´s law 10,835 from 2004 says that “A monthly benefit enough for the basic needs of a person will be paid equally to all. This basic income is to be instated by steps, taking care first of the most in need.” This law is still unregulated but the government, immediately after, created the successful Bolsa Familia (BF) program. Law 10,835 is unique in the world and needs to be regulated as to the steps to be taken to gradually universalize the benefit.
The Municipal Council for the Citizen’s Basic Income in the city of Santo Antonio do Pinhal has such a proposal.
Our initial proposal was to have a municipal pilot project fueled by a percentage of gross earnings from private businesses and private donations plus 6% per year from the city’s revenue. The idea was to create a fund to operate as the Alaska scheme. The Council analyzed carefully this proposal in the light of basic income principles and the practical attempts made to collect funds. We came to the conclusion that the Alaska way is impossible to succeed in our conditions besides we also do not accept that the annual and variable dividends represent the idea we have about a basic income.
Instead, we suggest that the path to Basic Income should go through 3 stages. We do not think this to be the best way for other countries but, considering Brazil’s situation, with almost 50 million under the support of the conditional BF (average of US$ 17.50 per person), we have a stepping stone to approach the final goal of including all in basic income. The steps suggested are:
Step 1 – Start the unconditional and universal basic income with all newborns in Brazil in the near future. The Council suggested that the caring parent receives US$ 35.00 per month and the same amount is deposited monthly in a savings account in name of the child, to be withdraw when he/she reaches legal age. This will be particularly valuable in two ways: it is financially viable, progressive and amenable to planning, will carry a strong symbolic value benefitting the children of the nation and pointing to a better future. This move will have a crucial educational value by giving people of all social classes time to understand the revolutionary value of a minimum income independent of work.
Step 2 – Next we suggest remove all conditionalities linked to the Bolsa Familia program. This will require that the funds for the almost 50 million involved (about 25% of our population) be doubled. We can predict that the result will be impressive economically and socially. The humiliation of means test, the complexity of the paperwork that opens the opportunity for political manipulation will vanish. The economy will benefit, and the results will be boosted by the possibility of taking regular jobs or opening a small business, both banned under the present conditionalities. These people will be freed from the known “poverty trap” created by the requirements for admission.
Step 3 – The Bolsa Familia bureaucracy can now be directed to monitor people that are still economically vulnerable but outside the government lists or people that fall into the “precariat”. They and their dependents should immediately receive the unconditional basic income.
PS: The Council can be reached by sending mail to maripnobrega@gmail.com
Phones: 55 12 9777 9115 or 55 12 3911 3839
by Yannick Vanderborght | Mar 11, 2013 | Opinion
On 21 and 22 February, 2013 in the building of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, a conference took place entitled Poverty and Inequality in Human Society. Proposals for an inclusive society. [1]
The Conference was opened by Thorbjørn Jagland, Secretary General of the Council of Europe. In his talk, he seemed somewhat in favor of a basic income, although his posture indicated that he did not wholeheartedly come forward for the idea.
However, the Head of the Unit “Social Cohesion, Research and Early Warning Division” [2] Ms. Gilda Farrell was more positive. She and her team prepared this conference. In her team were two members of BIEN (Basic Income Earth Network), Yannick Vanderborght and Louise Haagh. The team took 3 years of thorough preparation in advance of the conference. Farrell appeared later, when we interviewed her on Saturday with the film crew of the ECI-UBI, to be a strong supporter of the Unconditional Basic Income. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jnDUILaGPY) However, on the question of whether she wanted to be an ambassador for the UBI, she said she rather would not do this, because of the political implications that would bring. This is often the case with political leaders we have noticed.
We of the Association Basic Income [3] (Ad Planken, Leon Segers, Robin Ketelaars, and Christine Lambrecht from Belgium[4]) were highly surprised by the high “basic income level” of the conference. This was peppered with the term basic income. From the most unexpected corners of concern speakers referred to it. It looks like the “Early Warnings Division” discovered Basic Income at the right time. Europe is ready for a basic income, at least the Council of Europe is.
It is too much to report here what has been said, but the highlight was definitely Guy Standing as a spokesman for the precariat and a fan of Basic Income. Fintan Farrell, Director of EAPN [5] emphasized that the struggle for minimum income and the fight for basic income can reinforce each other to fight poverty and exclusion. Anna Coote of the New Economics Foundation gave some tips for a new economy, including a workweek of 21 hours maximum.
The conference was organized by the Social Cohesion Research and Early Warning Division [2]
SUMARY OF THE OBJECTIVES OF THE CONFERENCE:
- Analyze the current situation and poor problems / obstacles in the fight against poverty and inequality (limits of legal and democratic mechanisms to ensure that it takes into account the voices of people living in poverty, changes in redistributive policies, etc.);
- Formulate concrete proposals to make progress in the fight against poverty, taking into account the need for the voice of any person, to better utilize and share resources to avoid waste and ensure a more equal access to them, in a perspective of well-being for all;
- Exchange and share experiences, knowledge and practices to innovative measures to combat poverty and inequality, based on the concepts of common property, shared responsibility and avoiding the waste of resources to implement.
The conference was recorded on video and can be viewed via https://www.youtube.com/user/SocCohesionCoE
[1] “Poverty and Inequality in Societies of Human Rights: the paradox of democracies – Proposals for an Inclusive Society” https://rights-poverty.eu/conference/
More about social inclusion: https://books.google.nl/books/about/The_Inclusive_Society.html?id=TaRzQgAACAAJ
[2] https://www.coe.int/t/dg3/socialpolicies/socialcohesiondev/default_en.asp
[3] Vereniging Basisinkomen https://basisinkomen.nl
[4] Netwerk Basisinkomen Belgie https://basicincome.be
[5] https://www.eapn.eu/en/news-and-publications/news/eapn-news/participation-the-key-mechanism-for-social-inclusion-by-fintan-farrell-and-douhoumir-minev
by Yannick Vanderborght | Oct 4, 2012 | News
The international conference “Universal basic income: for new social contract in Europe” will bring together leading theoreticians on UBI and social welfare state, as well as their main opponents, to offer an open window for an international discussion and sharing of global experience on this topic in Slovenia. Feature speakers include, Philippe Van Parijs, author of Real Freedom for All, Joze Mencinger, a Professor at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Guy Standing, author of The Precariat, and Klaus Sambor, Secretary General of the European Sustainable Development NGO.
For more information, go to: https://www.inovum.si/ubi/.
by Yannick Vanderborght | Apr 30, 2012 | Opinion
The idea of a regular income that allows people to plan and fulfil a life project is a certainly linked to the topic of job markets reform. However, these two issues do not overlap. The reform of job contracts, new economic incentives, liberalization and tax exemptions can make the job market more efficient, but all these tools can not resolve the issue of effective risk of insecurity and irregularity in personal incomes.
Guaranteeing incomes is not the same than guaranteeing jobs: if the issue of income security involves the workers, the precariat, the unemployed, all the young men and women looking for their first job, it does not concern them as workers but as citizens. Or, to put it more precisely, as people with fundamental rights.
All humans, as biological beings, bear unavoidable material needs like housing, food, clothing, universal needs that are one with the human condition. These needs remain with the same urgency despite the ups and downs of the market, the changes in production and the greater or lesser demand of employees. The right to have an income and the right to work, therefore, are not the same because even in the absence of a stable employment, the continuity of income is essential to meet unavoidable basic needs.
People do not need to prove that they deserve fundamental rights. Basic rights are inherent to the dignity that democratic systems recognize to the human person. The rights to basic education and public health care have already been codified in our (Italian) legal system as rights for all, because they create the essential conditions to exercise and enjoy all the other rights that the Italian Constitution and Law recognizes and protects.
The forced slimming cure of our welfare states in this critical economical moment must be accompanied by a revolution in the way of thinking the protection of social rights. We need a more universal welfare state, with less managing costs, less dependent from an inefficient (and often arbitrary) bureaucratic selectivity that has been the main source of corruption and waste of public money over the years.
The universal ex lege recognition of the right to receive a guaranteed basic income would be a first and effective protection against the hazards of market and would build a safety net to prevent people from falling into a state of misery.
The history of liberal-democratic States, and their legal systems, is the history of the recognition of rights to an always more extended group until the moment in which some rights, considered as essential, were recognized as universal. One of the greatest achievements of the legal culture of the 19th Century was the abolition of slavery in the United States, with the following recognition of civil rights for all, whites and blacks. In the 20th Century, the universal suffrage represents the extension to all citizens of a basic political right. I see no reasons to stop the process only at civil and political rights. Why is it not possible to admit that at least some socio-economic rights have a similar essential value? Why don’t we make them independent from personal conditions, skills and attitudes as we do with the majority of civil and political rights?
The question of a universal and unconditional income, an income that allows at least to cope with the most basic necessities of life is unavoidable. Philippe Van Parijs is probably right in saying that it represents the biggest reform that will define the democratic states of the 21st Century, as the end of slavery and the universal suffrage marked the democratic life of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
