by BIEN | Oct 9, 2016 | News
Unconditional Basic Income Europe (UBIE), a regional affiliate of BIEN, has begun to raise funds through the crowdfunding platform Open Collective.
UBIE works to secure the implementation of unconditional basic income across Europe.
The organization formed in 2014 after the European Citizens Initiative (ECI) for Basic Income had, in the previous year, brought together people from 25 countries and collected 300,000 signatures in support of the idea.
Since then, UBIE has worked with regional basic income groups to organise public events in Brussels, Athens, Maribor, Budapest, Maastricht and Hamburg. Its members are currently looking forward to their next meeting in Madrid, 14-16 October which will feature a public roundtable with Spanish, French, Swiss and Scandinavian activists and BIEN co-chair Karl Widerquist. The event concludes, fittingly, on the eve of the UN’s International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (17 October).
In addition to supporting and exchanging information with regional groups, UBIE is actively engaged in lobbying and research projects. At the moment, UBIE members are writing a response to the EU’s Social Pillar proposals, developing ways to practically implement the Eurodividend first proposed by Philippe van Parijs, gathering interested localities into an EU-wide pilot project, researching the potential impact of basic income on local food systems, and organising to make sure another EU-wide ECI for basic income gains even more support than the last.
Despite having existed for only two years, UBIE was mentioned in a recent report by a research group for the European Parliament as one of the ‘key civil society organisations’ working on basic income in Europe.
So far, UBIE has been run entirely by volunteers working in their spare time. In order to fulfill its ambitions and expand its reach, however, the alliance wants to professionalise some aspects of its work. Money is needed to maintain the ‘back office’ aspects of the alliance, to help activists travel to meetings, to hire interpreters and, eventually, to staff a small office in Brussels.
Open Collective provides a transparent funding platform where contributors can make regular donations and follow how their money is being spent, while organisations can crowdsource a regular and reliable funding stream.
If you would like to support UBIE’s work, please follow this link: https://opencollective.com/ubie
by Harry Pitts | Jun 29, 2014 | Research
PUBLISHER’S SUMMARY: ‘Philippe Van Parijs argues for a basic income for all legal residents of the European Union to be financed by Value Added Tax. Unlike the US, the EU lacks automatic inter-state transfers and migration between states is much less common. A universal basic income would serve as a buffering mechanism and enable a stronger recovery from economic downturns. It would also help the Union overcome the pressures of competitiveness, while the EU may also be seen as more legitimate and less of a heartless bureaucracy in the eyes of its residents.’
Philippe Van Parijs, “The Eurodividend: Why the EU should introduce a basic income for all”, LSE EUROPP Blog, 24th July 2013
Philippe Van Parijs
by Yannick Vanderborght | Jan 13, 2014 | Opinion
By Marina Pasetto Nóbrega.
We read the recent article by Philippe Van Parijs suggesting a Euro-dividend for all in the EU. That would represent about 200 Euros monthly to each and everyone, unconditionally. And, he points out, this minimum basic income or citizen’s income can be supplemented with income from labor, capital or social benefits. The author calculated that the total expenses amount to 10% of the EU’s GDP. Recently the citizens of Switzerland petitioned their parliament to examine a proposal for a basic income for all adults, amounting to about US$ 2,800/monthly. This is a mighty sum but Switzerland is a rich country with a small population. Iran, among economic changes applauded by the IMF, introduced an unconditional cash transfer that benefits 90% of its population. We would spare the readers of this newsletter the arguments that Van Parijs aligned to justify the proposal as they are most likely familiar to supporters of the basic income idea.
What we want to discuss is the way to turn the utopia into reality. 10% of the GDP is a sum that will be a formidable barrier to implementation of the benefit. We draw from the discussions we are having in a Brazilian city where there is a Municipal Council devoted to devise a way to start a basic income in steps, as required (in Brazil) by the 2004 law that created the benefit but still awaits regulation(1). Our government, as almost every government in democracies, has a bureaucracy that takes care of requests from the unemployed or underemployed. In Brazil 13.9 million means-tested families are receiving help from the Bolsa Familia program. That amounts to about 40 million persons, nearly 25% of our population. We would argue that the easier first step to initiate an unconditional and permanent basic income for all Brazilians is to target the present Bolsa Familia beneficiaries. Just turn the present benefits permanent and unconditional. The poverty trap will be eliminated. The bureaucracy can now search for the remaining poor and families or individuals that fall into economic vulnerability. Those will receive the permanent minimum income. The existing government social security network will be active monitoring those that enter the “precariat”, moving them to the minimum income shelter. We would claim that such a strategy would also be more palatable and less costly to the EU residents.
We also would like to stress the importance of the minimum income not only as a basic human right but as a necessary measure if we want to improve the safety and well-being of rich and poor because want will increase social unrest and crime for all. It will grant people, amidst the modern revolution in the job market, time to wait for new opportunities that we still cannot foresee or get training to qualify for existing or emerging jobs. The right to frugality independent of work seems relevant when a lot of people pay lip service against excessive consumption. A better life, for those without other means except the basic income, will also boost, we hope, communal arrangements to lower costs for all involved.
The modern situation that adds urgency, in our view, to the implementation of a basic income has been analyzed by scholars and we would like to mention just two studies: Brynjolfsson and McFee(2) have shown that notwithstanding a continuous rise in productivity, the last two decades exhibit a marked reduction in job opportunities. This modern decoupling is due to developments like electronic computation, robotics and artificial intelligence. Job openings are being reduced in a very marked way. Frey and Osborne(3) released a very interesting study of 702 occupations, charting out the many that are in the road to extinction due to the modern trends mentioned. In the US the authors estimate that 47% of jobs are at risk of being automated within a decade or two. Also a fundamental psychological barrier exists and resides in the deeply engrained notion that income has to be linked to work. People will have to overcome that as we did in the recent past with slavery, torture and the rights of women and minorities, finally embracing solidarity in the economic realm.
Anywhere we could hasten the arrival of the basic income dream by taking the stepwise approach, using the existing social agencies to permanently move into the unconditional minimum income the vulnerable.
1 Our proposal was presented in BIEN news in 2012 as “A three-step proposal to get to a basic income for all in Brazil”.
2 Race Against the Machine – how the digital revolution is accelerating innovation, driving productivity, and irreversibly transforming employment and the economy. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McFee, 2011, Digital Frontier Press, Mass, USA
3 The future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerization?, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, 2013,
https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf
We thank Jim Hesson for generously reviewing the text
by Karl Widerquist | Jul 8, 2013 | News
In this short article, Philippe Van Parijs proposes a Euro-dividend, which he describes as “one, simple and radical, yet … reasonable and urgent” proposal. The Euro-dividend is a modest basic income for every legal resident of the European Union. According to Van Parijs, “This income provides each resident with a universal and unconditional floor that can be supplemented at will by labour income, capital income and social benefits. Its level can vary from country to country to track the cost of living, and it can be lower for the young and higher for the elderly.”
Van Parijs is a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium and the author Real Freedom for All: what (if anything) can justify capitalism.
Van Parijs, Philippe, “The Euro-Dividend,” Social Europe Journal, July 3, 2013
by Yannick Vanderborght | Apr 3, 2012 | Research
In this opinion piece published by the French daily Le Monde (March 6, 2012), Philippe Van Parijs (Louvain University, Hoover Chair) compares the eurozone with the United States. Inspired by the works of Martin Feldstein and others, he argues that the eurozone will only be viable at the price of increased interpersonal solidarity. This solidarity, Van Parijs argues, should take the form of a modest individual income floor funded by VAT, i.e. a so-called “Euro-Dividend”.
The piece (in French) is online at:
https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2012/03/06/pas-d-eurozone-viable-sans-euro-dividende_1652164_3232.html
A Dutch version has been published by the Belgian daily De Morgen: https://www.demorgen.be/dm/nl/2461/De-Gedachte/article/detail/1400934/2012/02/28/Geen-duurzame-euro-zonder-eurodividend.dhtml
