by Kate McFarland | Mar 3, 2017 | News
Some commentators have inaccurately claimed that EU leader Jean-Claude Juncker recommended basic income during a speech earlier in the year.
In January 2017, Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission (the Executive Branch of European Union), addressed a European conference on the Pillar of Social Rights. He advised EU member states to adopt minimum salaries and wages, stating, “There should be a minimum salary in each country of the European Union” and adding (according to a report in Reuters) that those seeking work should also have a guaranteed minimum level of income.
Basic Income News did not initially cover the story, as it is not directly relevant to basic income. Since this time, however, Juncker has been occasionally misreported as having advised members states to adopt a basic income. In fact, he said no such thing at the Pillar of Social Rights conference, where he merely called for minimum salaries to workers and unemployed job-seekers throughout the EU. Generally speaking, moreover, Juncker has not been known as an advocate of basic income, despite earlier statements suggesting that he might support the idea.
BIEN’s European affiliate, Unconditional Basic Income Europe (UBIE), has issued the following statement in reply to Junker’s comments:
“While harmonised minimum income and minimum wage levels throughout Europe would be an improvement, this has nothing to do with moving towards a basic income.”
One of our proposals – that a ‘Eurodividend’ be paid to every EU citizen – would be a far more ambitious and transformative option where the EU could take the lead rather than waiting for the Member States to act. This would truly help support EU citizens through times of crisis, help balance income distribution throughout the EU and mitigate forced migration through lack of jobs and/or income. It could help those countries most affected by the economic crisis get back on their feet by making it possible for their youth to stay.
“Given the urgency of the economic and political situation, and the widening discussions of basic income both inside the European Parliament and its committees, we urge the European Commission to follow the lead of its Employment and Social Affairs Commissioner Marianne Thyssen. She has already pointed out the necessity of discussing basic income when thinking about future transformation of our social systems.
“Further laws and directives around minimum income and wages will have little effect on those countries already forced to cut their social security budgets under austerity measures. The EU should lead the way in providing some form of income security for all of its citizens if it wants to stem the rising tide of nationalism throughout Europe.”
On February 16, the European Parliament voted on a series of policy recommendations for the European Commission concerning the future of work. The Parliament rejected a proposal to recommend that “a general basic income should be seriously considered” to address the economic impact of automation and artificial intelligence.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo: Jean-Claude Juncker, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 epp group
by Roberta Stewart | Mar 3, 2017 | News
Tim Hollo, the Executive Director of The Green Institute, an Australian based think tank supporting research and discussion around green/left politics, spoke with Des Lawrence of Radio Adelaide on January 29 to give a brief synopsis of a discussion paper entitled “Can Less Work Be More Fair?” This paper, which was released by the Institute in December 2016, is about the significance and implications of a Universal Basic Income and a shorter working week.
Hollo describes the “obvious challenges” which have led to an increased global interest and trial of the UBI in various countries. He discusses such challenges as environmental and ecological crisis driven by consumerism, the acceleration of automation which poses a threat to millions of jobs, and rising inequality which is bringing about political destabilisation. The Brexit vote, the rise of Trump in the US, and in Australia the increased popularity of the right wing populist Senator Pauline Hanson are all indicators of political unrest. As Hollo explains “…the growing strength of the far right, driven by inequality and disconnection…are at heart being created by the neoliberal capitalist frameworks that we live in”.
“Can Less Work Be More Fair?” offers a perspective on UBI as a progressive and redistributive policy, designed to address the growing uncertainty within the labour market. The report covers a diversity of opinions, from those who strongly support the UBI, to those who take a more nuanced approach, and suggest that a UBI will require the support of supplementary policies if it is to secure the fairer societal outcomes that its advocates intend.
A full recording of the interview is available on the website of Radio Adelaide.
The complete report, Can Less Work Be More Fair?, is available for download from The Green Institute here. Kate McFarland has written for a summary of its contents for Basic Income News.
Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 marissaorton
by Michael Lewis | Feb 28, 2017 | Opinion
Written by: Michael A. Lewis
Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center
When I first became interested in the basic income, I was a graduate student studying welfare reform. For those who aren’t in the know, “welfare” is the more common name used in the U.S. to refer to a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and which used to be called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). TANF and AFDC aren’t exactly the same programs, but they do have some key things in common: they provide financial support to low income persons, most of those who receive such support are women and children, and, I think it’s fair to say, both programs are somewhat controversial.
The controversy around welfare has to do with the fact that many of those who receive benefits are apparently “able-bodied” persons who’re thought capable of working (“working” in this context means selling one’s labor in return for a wage, instead of, say, taking care of one’s children, something many would regard as work). Yet not enough of those on welfare are working, according to a common belief among many U.S. citizens/residents as well as, apparently, politicians. So in an attempt to socialize welfare beneficiaries into understanding the importance of work, many of them are required to work in return for their benefits, a practice commonly called “workfare.” Many also remain poor, even after receiving benefits, because the financial support they receive is pretty meager.
As a graduate student, I thought workfare, as well as the low level of benefits provided to recipients was a very unjust way of assisting poor persons; I also thought we could do better (in fact, I still think these things). My entry into the world of basic income was because I believed it a more just way of addressing poverty than welfare and related programs.
Once I started studying basic income and meeting others interested in the idea, I heard other justifications for it. It would enhance freedom, it would allow people to engage in care work if they so choose, it would give people an income representing their share of commonly owned natural resources, it would be a way of replacing some or all of the welfare state (which, of course, assumes there is something wrong with the current system), etc. But the argument that seems to have caught on the most, at least in the U.S., is the idea that a basic income will become necessary as robots/machines take our jobs.
I have to admit that part of me has been a bit concerned about the degree to which the automation argument seems to dominate basic income discussions. My worry is that as we spend so much time debating who’s right about whether robots will take most, or perhaps all, of our jobs and, therefore, whether there’ll be a need for a basic income, other arguments for such a policy get “crowded out” of the discussion. Yet as I’ve voiced this concern, mainly to myself, I’ve also wondered why this argument for a basic income seems to have caught on in a way that others haven’t?
I think part of the answer has to do with where I started—U.S. citizens/residents worry a lot about the degree to which healthy people work to take care of themselves (and their families) and are quite skeptical about policies they believe will allow people to shirk this responsibility. But I think another part of the answer has to do with the role of race in our society. I suspect that in the minds of many citizens/residents the degree to which a basic income would allow people to shirk their obligations to work would vary by race. To put it bluntly, I suspect many assume that black and brown people would be more likely to shirk this responsibility than whites would be. If I’m right about all this, then perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the U.S. isn’t naturally the most fertile place for the basic income idea to take hold. But why would it take hold in the form of the automation argument? I think the answer here might be pretty simple. If machines are about to take all our jobs, then automation represents a relatively indiscriminant force. That is, “hard working white people” might be threatened just as much as “lazy shiftless brown ones” are. Perhaps this has been enough to get white folks to take notice of a policy that perhaps could address the problem.
About the author: Michael A. Lewis is a social worker and sociologist by training whose areas of interest are public policy and quantitative methods. He’s also a co-founder of USBIG and has written a number of articles, book chapters, and other pieces on the basic income, including the co-edited work The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee. Lewis is on the faculties of the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and the Graduate and University Center of the City University of New York.
by Kate McFarland | Feb 27, 2017 | News
Intelligence Squared U.S. (IQ2US), a debate program moderated by ABC News correspondent John Donvan and broadcast on more than 200 public stations, will air an episode on basic income on Wednesday, March 22.
Four guests will debate the question “Is the universal basic income the safety net of the future?”
“For the Motion”
- Charles Murray (W. H. Brady Scholar at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute). Murray supports a basic income of $10,000 per year to all Americans over age 21, which would replace all current welfare programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security (as laid out in his recently reissued book In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State). Murray’s right-wing approach to basic income has made him a controversial figure within the movement, with many progressive UBI supporters disavowing his proposals.
“Against the Motion”
- Jared Bernstein (Senior Fellow of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; formerly Chief Economist to Vice President Joe Biden). In a previous debate with Murray, Bernstein maintained that replacing the social safety net with a universal basic income would undercut advances in fighting poverty and ultimately leave many of the poor worse off.
- Jason Furman (Senior Fellow at the nonpartisan think tank Peterson Institute; formerly Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors to President Barack Obama). Furman voiced his opposition to basic income in a speech at a White House workshop in July 2016, viewing the policy as giving up on the possibility of job creation and full employment.
The event will be staged live at the Kaufman Center in New York, NY, including an hour long reception before the debate (see details on the live event here). The debate will also be streamed live on the web.
For more information and to listen to the live stream on March 22, 6:45 pm Eastern Time, visit “The Universal Basic Income Is The Safety Net Of The Future.”
Reviewed by Danny Pearlberg
Photo of Kaufman Center (event venue), CC BY-SA 3.0 Kaufman Center
by Kate McFarland | Feb 26, 2017 | News
The city of Barcelona is preparing to test an income maintenance program in one of its poorest districts. While it has been called a ‘basic income’, the tested programs diverge in several ways from BIEN’s definition of the term.
Urban Innovative Actions (UIA), an initiative of the European Commission that supports projects investigating “innovative and creative solutions” in urban areas, has allocated €4.85 million (about $5.15 million) to fund a three-year pilot study of guaranteed minimum income (GMI) in Barcelona, Spain. The project is dubbed “B-Mincome” in reference to Mincome, a well-known study of GMI conducted in the late 1970s in Manitoba, Canada.
In the B-Mincome experiment, 1,000 randomly selected households in the Besos district — one of Barcelona’s most economically disadvantaged areas — will receive cash subsidies of an amount sufficient to ensure that their earnings exceed the poverty line. At the time of this writing, the City Council of Barcelona is still finalizing the design of the study. However, the city plans to test several types of GMI schemes, and it plans to investigate them in conjunction with improvements in public services.
According to Project Manager Fernando Barreiro, the objective of B-Mincome is to “test and analyse how effective forms of universal economic support, combined with access to services such as housing, education, work and community participation can reduce poverty.” Results from the pilot will be used in a comparative analysis of the cost and effectiveness of different anti-poverty policies, “with the ultimate goal of developing more efficient welfare services.”
While the B-Mincome pilot bears some similarity to a universal basic income (UBI), and has been called by this name, it should be noted that the program to be tested is neither universal nor individual. Moreover, some of the GMI schemes to be tested may not be unconditional.
First, the B-Mincome program will provide a cash supplement to boost low incomes rather than a uniform and universal cash grant (as was also the case in the Manitoba’s Mincome experiment). These supplements will guarantee that no participant in the study has a household income below poverty level. However, as typical of GMI schemes, the amount of the supplement will be reduced if a household’s income increases during the course of the experiment.
Moreover, the design of the study will promote the targeting of the most disadvantaged recipients. Researchers will employ a randomized block design to ensure the representation of various types of households that tend to suffer the most poverty (e.g. immigrants, single-parent families, the long-term unemployed, and unemployed youth).
Second, as already implied, the payments will be to households rather than individuals.
Finally, some of the variations to be examined are likely to impose conditions of the receipt of the benefit. Barreiro has related, for example, that the city is considering testing a GMI program that makes benefits conditional searching for a job, participating in a training program, or doing work for the community. Such a program would be analyzed for its efficiency and effectiveness against a GMI lacking these conditions.
To develop B-Mincome, the Barcelona City Council has partnered with four research organizations and institutions: the Young Foundation, the Institute of Governance and Public Policy (IGOP) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, and the Catalan Institution for Evaluation of Public Policies (IVALUA). The city is also consulting with contacts within the governments of Finland, the Canadian province of Ontario, and the Dutch municipality of Utrecht, which are currently running or about to run their own similar pilot studies.
Sources
The Young Foundation, “Young Foundation partners with Barcelona City Council to help deliver radical project in the fight against poverty” (press release), October 28, 2016.
“Linking the Urban Development Network and the Urban Innovative Actions in Barcelona,” Urban Innovative Actions, January 9, 2017.
“B-MINCOME – Combining guaranteed minimum income and active social policies in deprived urban areas,” Urban Innovative Actions.
Fernando Barreiro, personal communication.
Photo: “Homeless in Barcelona” CC BY-NC 2.0 Melvin Gaal
Note: A previous version of this article incorrectly listed IESE as one of the City of Barcelona’s partners in the pilot. It has been corrected to IVALUA. (Edited March 2, 2017.)
