by Sandro Gobetti | Mar 14, 2013 | News
[by Sabrina Del Pico – BIN Italia]
In January 2013, a few weeks before general elections, Beppe Grillo, the colourful leader of Movimento 5 Stelle – M5S (5 Star Movement) declared: “The first thing we will do, after entering the Parliament, is to introduce a citizen’s income for those who lost their jobs or do not have a job”. During the campaign for the national Parliament M5S presented its agenda including 20 points, the second of which was what Beppe Grillo improperly called a citizen’s income.
That term is usually used synonymously with the term basic income for an unconditional income given to all without any means test or work requirement. Grillo instead used it essentially as a new name for unemployment insurance conditional on readiness to accept a job if one becomes available. Grillo himself said in a recent interview (in Italian), “the employment offices will offer people one, two, three jobs. If they don’t accept those jobs they will lose the benefit.” He did not even clarify whether the job offer must be appropriate for the individual’s skills.
M5S won an astonishing victory. It emerged as Italy’s biggest single party in the lower chamber with 8.7 million over, nearly a quarter of all votes cast. Its leader did not eat his words pronounced during the electoral campaign and went on talking about the introduction of a what he calls citizen’s income as one of the most important actions to be taken.
If on the one hand, it is unprecedented that Italian mainstream politicians put on their agenda measures addressing citizens’ economic conditions; on the other hand it added confusion to political language and therefore also to concepts and outcomes. See the link below for an article misunderstanding Grillo’s use of the term citizens income. M5S’ proposal considers a measure that provides unemployed with €1000 a month for 3 years. It is a quite vague proposal as regards the implementation process but as one point: the measure is entirely conditional to availability for work or some kind of commitment to a reintegration trajectory. It is clear, therefore, that what they call a citizen’s income is actually a kind of unemployment benefit, either contributory or non-contributory. This is not a mere linguistic issue. It actually hides – or reveals, according to the standpoint – an inadequate and shallow knowledge of welfare state policies by mainstream politics, which implies the risk to implement a workfare measure passed off as a basic income.
Nevertheless, this proposal opened a lively debate in the mainstream politics about the necessity to provide citizens facing economic problems with some kind of income support. Nearly all Italian political parties are now aware that the issue of introducing an income support scheme is an inescapable fact.
As a matter of fact, in July 2012, BIN Italia, along with many associations and grassroots organisations, already launched a campaign to propose a popular initiative bill on guaranteed minimum income in Italy. The campaign, which ended in December 2012, was a great success. It reached its target to collect 50,000 signatures, and therefore the popular initiative bill on guaranteed minimum income may not only represent an important contribution to the current debate but it may also help determine implementation and practical aspects of welfare reform in Italy.
RELATED LINKS:
The website, truthout.org, published a long article (in English) on M5S’s policy entirely under the misapprehension that M5S had endorsemed basic income: Ellen Brown, “QE for the People: Comedian Beppe Grillo’s Populist Plan for Italy,” Truthout, Thursday, 07 March 2013: https://truth-out.org/news/item/14953-qe-for-the-people-comedian-beppe-grillos-populist-plan-for-italy
An article (in Italian) by Roberto Ciccarelli appears in Il Manifesto briefly explaining the difference between a basic income and the unemployment benefit particularly in the light of the latest statements made by main mainstream politicians. He clarifies the positions of Bersani (Democratic Party), Vendola (SEL Sinistra Ecologia Libertà – Left Ecology Freedom), and Grillo (M5S) as well as those of some grassroots organizations such as BIN Italia and San Precario. Ciccarelli is one of the few in the mainstream media to highlight the haziness of Grillo’s proposal: https://www.ilmanifesto.it/area-abbonati/ricerca/nocache/1/manip2n1/20130302/manip2pg/06/manip2pz/336754/manip2r1/ciccarelli/
by Sandro Gobetti | Mar 7, 2013 | News
[BIN-Italia – January 2013]
A public meeting entitled “Citizen’s Income: the Hypothesis of a Guaranteed Minimum Income” was held in Rome at La Villetta on January 16th. The Forum on Labour, Rights, and Youth Employment organised the event in co-operation with the political party SEL – Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (Left Ecology Freedom).
The program of the meeting included the following speakers and themes:
Enzo D’arcangelo (member of the Forum on Labour, Rights, and Youth Employment): New forms of poverty and new welfare state
Mauro Palma (European Council, and National Presidency of SEL): Fundamental Rights, material conditions, and social risks
Giuseppe Bronzini (Judge in the Supreme Court of Cassation in Italy, and BIN Italia member): Citizen’s Income
Mariapia Pizzolante (TILT): The campaign for a Guaranteed Minimum Income
https://www.bin-italia.org/
by Karl Widerquist | Feb 25, 2013 | News
[BIN-Italia – December 2012]
The political party SEL – Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (Left Ecology Freedom) organised a public debate on the right to exist and guaranteed income in the city of Modena on the 4th of December 2012 at Sala Giacomo Ulivi. The debate was coordinated by Simone Muzzioli who is the spokesperson of the Forum “Social Rights, Labour, Knowledges and Freedom”. Andrea Fumagalli, who is a well known Professor of Economics at the University of Pavia, and member of BIN Italia, as well as one of those who wrote the popular initiative bill on guaranteed minimum income in Italy, took part in the debate.
The event represented an occasion to directly and actively deal with issues such as guaranteed income and labour.
https://www.bin-italia.org/
by Yannick Vanderborght | Feb 6, 2013 | News
General elections will be held in Italy on 24-25 February 2013. After the presentation of Mario Monti’s “Agenda for Italy”, Beppe Grillo, the colourful leader of Movimento 5 stelle (5 Stars Movement) proposed a counter-agenda in 16 points, in which the second point is a “Guarantee Citizens’ Income”. After the news of suicides provoked by the critical economic situation, Grillo asserted on his blog that “No one should be left behind” and that every one needs to be assured of some sort of basic guaranteed income as soon as possible. In a public speech he said that in these times of economic crisis, the funding for it would be found by taking money from the so called “gold pensions”, i.e. taxing retirement benefits over four thousand euros. However, his (somewhat vague) proposal remains closer to a minimum income conditional upon work availability than to a true basic income.
Movimento 5 stelle is not the only party that put some form of citizens’ income on its agenda. Elettra Deiana, member of the national presidential committee of Sel (Sinistra Ecologia Libertà / Left Ecology and Freedom) has called for a welfare reform to ensure every adult with no means and who is looking for work an income that can cover his/her basic needs.
If the policy proposed by the two parties is not really an unconditional basic income, it’s important to stress that for the first time in Italy the problem of non-contributory income support (i.e. not linked with previous contribution or prior work activity) has featured in a campaign for the national Parliament.
Links
Beppe Grillo on guarantee citizen income:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04ECfodHwuo
https://www.beppegrillo.it/2012/05/omicidi_sociali.html
Elettra Deiana (Sel) on basic income:
https://www.sinistraecologialiberta.it/articoli/reddito-lavoro-esistenza-il-quid-della-cittadinanza/
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jan 7, 2013 | Opinion
BIEN now stands for ‘Basic Income Earth Network’. Once every two years BIEN holds a congress, and this year’s showed just how appropriate the name now is and how inappropriate it would be to still call it the ‘Basic Income European Network’. There were participants from South Africa, Namibia, India, Japan, South Korea, the United States, Canada, Latin America, and numerous European countries. Over three hundred in all gathered for forty-eight hours of plenary sessions, workshops and panels: often six different workshops and panels at one time, with three or four speakers each, to enable all of the papers to be delivered and discussed.
The congress was titled ‘Pathways to a Basic Income’. There was a sort of pattern to the timetable. Friday’s sessions were largely on the current state of the debate, Saturday on routes towards implementation of a Citizen’s Income, and Sunday on a Citizen’s Income’s relationships with such vital themes as ecology, rights, justice, and democracy: but nothing is that tidy, and each day contained a wide diversity of presentations and discussions touching on all of those areas.
The high point was a set of presentations by Guy Standing and representatives of India’s Self Employed Workers Association on the Indian Universal Cash Transfers pilot project and on some of the interim results. Of all of the sessions that I attended this one got by far the longest applause. The other high point, though a rather lower key presentation, was the significant story of Iran’s Citizen’s Income told by Hamid Tabatabai during one of the panel sessions.
The Congress was a quite inspiring mixture of the visionary and the realistic, of the broad-brush and the detailed, of the theoretical and the practical, and Germany’s Netzwerk Grundeinkommen (Basic Income Network) is to be congratulated on organising such a highly successful event.
