UBI gives enormous power to the people because it secures the freedom from want for everyone. I’ll argue that, by freeing people from labor-market dependence, it will alter or reverse some of the most harmful power dynamics that exist in the economy today. As I argue about how important this power can be to the 99%, it will become apparent how much of the opposition to UBI is ultimately driven by elite fear of that very power.
The separation of power is one of the central principles of democracy. The mechanisms are familiar: judicial, executive, and legislative powers are supposed to check each other. To some extent, the people check all these powers with their vote. But as disadvantaged citizens throughout the history of the United States and most other democracies can attest, the individual vote of a disadvantaged person has limited value as a check on powerful economic and political interests. Our vote amounts to little more than the opportunity to answer a multiple-choice test once every so many years. The realistic options presented to us on ballots are limited to those who successfully raise money by appealing to the donor class—the 1%, perhaps, most importantly, the 0.001%. Evidence shows that money has more influence on policy outcomes than voters do, and even if we fix that problem, our vote is one among many millions. Even in a perfect democracy, the majority doesn’t always have the best interests of the most vulnerable people at heart.
In the marketplace, we call ourselves “free labor” because we can say yes or no to any one employer. But among the market-dependent majority, the labor market is another multiple-choice test. The power to switch is an important check on any one employer, but it’s a very limited check on the power that employers and resource owners in general have over people in general. We lack the power to say no to the list of choices, although sometimes we can see that all the choices available to us are bad. A labor-market-dependent person has little power over their own life. This power collapses to powerlessness as the labor-market options available to them become fewer or less attractive.
A livable UBI is the ultimate check in government and in economics, because it devolves one important piece of real power to the individual level: the freedom from labor-market dependence; the power to say no to any and all employment. The weakest, most-vulnerable person can wield this power in concert with others or alone if they have to, and it has real effects. They can use it to demand better wages and working conditions, or to reject labor if no attractive offers are forthcoming. They can use it to protect themselves from abusive domestic partners or to protect their children from exploitation. They can use it to start a business or a cooperative, so that they don’t have to play the economic game as it is presented to them. They can use it as a tool to press for political goals and to resist oppression of all kinds.
Some people, especially privileged people, allege that we won’t work if UBI exists. We should ask them, are your job offers so terrible that no one with the power to refuse would take them? Do you have to threaten people with economic destitution, homelessness, begging, and eating out of garbage cans to get us to accept the wages and working conditions you offer? If so, maybe your job offers are the problem, rather than the people who refuse them. As Franklin Roosevelt argued more than 90 years ago, “[N]o business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”[i]
If the economy is the mutually beneficial social project people claim it to be, employers should not need to rely on making it impossible for people to say no to their offers. Employers ought to be able to give us offers that we will gladly accept when living entirely off UBI is our only alternative. UBI is a modest income. It’s not equal income for all. It’s a floor. People who live solely on it, live on less than literally everyone else. Any job, even one hour a week, is a step up financially. When we, the people, have the independent option UBI provides, employers have to earn our respect if they want to receive the benefit of our labor, skill, and ambition. That’s power to the people.
The market reacts to incentives. Any incentive for people to work more is an incentive for employers to pay less, to demand longer work hours, to allow working conditions to deteriorate, and so on. When 95% of people are labor market dependent, the predictable market reaction is lower wages and poorer working conditions than would prevail if 100% of the people had the power to say no to serving the interests of employers, clients, banks, and landowners.
Labor market dependence might not bind very noticeably on many of us in the upper half of the working class. We make four-to-ten times as much as we’d get in a generous UBI. The system seems to be working for us well enough. We have secure food, shelter, and housing. We can’t imagine ourselves homeless. Although we know the system isn’t completely fair, it’s comforting to think that the difference between us and people living paycheck-to-paycheck is much more about our behavior than our advantages. This belief is comforting because it reduces both feelings of guilt that we should do something and feelings of fear that we might yet end up in more distressing circumstances. We might be reluctant to rock the boat because we can see that things could be much worse for us.
But things could be better too. We lack the power to demand a 4-day work week, early retirement, or a guaranteed pension. Even very well-off Americans have shorter vacation time and a later retirement age than workers in almost every other industrialized country. Our proudly learned skills don’t give us the power to command any of those things. We aren’t as respected and valued by the people above us as we would like. Even some very highly skilled people have jobs they recognize as bullshit. We have significant stress and fear about maintaining our position in society. Most of us have never felt safe enough to take a mid-career sabbatical. Although per capita income has doubled over the last 40 years or so, thanks in part to contributions of people like us, we have not had the power to command a proportional share of income growth. Almost all of the financial benefit of the last 50 years of U.S. economic growth has gone to the top 1 or 2%. The things we might be able to achieve with more power in the workplace are harder to see than the things we have now, but they are just as important.
Imagine the power the 95% will gain when we are all free from the need to conform ourselves to the available options, when would-be employers have to make offers that a population of genuinely free laborers will willingly perform. Gone are the incentives to pay poverty wages, to offer unsafe conditions, to treat workers with disrespect. The opportunity for owners and managers to get away with sexual harassment and other forms of mistreatment are significantly reduced. The incentive for owners to share the benefits of economic growth with the 95% are greatly increased. The ability for people to unionize and strike are increased enormously when they have a modest-but-permanent income to fall back on.
It’s hard to say how far up the income scale benefits will flow, but it could be a lot farther than you might surmise simply from the observation that most of us in the upper half of the working class wouldn’t find much attraction in quitting our jobs to live off UBI even temporarily. A generous UBI plan would be a net benefit to 70% of U.S. families even if their wages don’t change at all.[ii] And the bargaining position of workers in that upper portion of the working or middle class depends very much on the position of people below. When people below you are better off, you have more power to command good treatment from the employers above you.
The last 50 years have seen a decline in the relative income of middle-class families as social support for people below them declined. It is possible to reverse that change, especially when one considers the enormous increase in income, wealth, and wasteful consumption of the 1% over the last 50 years. The key to making that happen is to increase the market power of the 99% as a whole.
Workers will be much freer to organize unions and to conduct strikes with the “inexhaustible strike fund” that a livable UBI provides.[iii] How this would change the political landscape and relationship between labor and capital is unfathomable until we try it, but it will not be small.
The likelihood that UBI would greatly increase the power of unions was not lost on employers when a watered-down guaranteed income was under discussion during the Nixon administration. A spokesperson for the National Association of Manufacturers testified that union members should lose their guaranteed income the moment a labor dispute began, because apparently, manufacturers do not want workers to have the power to say no to bad jobs.[iv]
There are direct measures we can and should take to restore the balance of power between unions and employers, but there is no substitute for the power that comes with independence. Unions have traditionally been most successful in specialized trades in high-profit industries with barriers to entry. For example, players’ associations in professional sports are probably the most successful unions in history, even if professional athletes might need unions less than most other workers.
The power that a sufficiently large UBI would give the least-skilled, most easily replaceable workers—such as domestic servants, migrant laborers, and so on—might make it possible for them to organize effective unions for the first time. Many factors lead in this direction. I’ve mentioned UBI as a strike fund. It also provides funds workers could pool to support the organization. Unions are most effective in tight labor markets. The least attractive sectors are likely to see the most tightening when UBI is introduced. That’s one of the great things about UBI: it gives the biggest boost in power to the people who have the least power right now.
The power a livable UBI gives workers doesn’t stop with increasing the ability to organize. It increases workers’ power on both the collective and individual levels. If you can’t get into a union, or you think your union failed to stand up for you, you can take a sabbatical. Think things over. Look into education and retraining toward a career where people will treat you better. If many workers in one sector of the job market opt out—even without any coordination between them—it will give owners and managers in that sector a powerful incentive to improve wages and working conditions or perhaps to realize the jobs in this sector aren’t worth doing.
UBI will be an enormous help for the one financially dependent group of workers we know is incapable of forming a union: abused spouses and parents of children who are being abused, neglected, or exploited by the other parent or another person. Most people who find themselves in situations like this are women who are financially dependent on husbands, boyfriends, bosses, and so on. Just as a livable UBI gives employees the power to say no to bad jobs, it gives otherwise financially dependent women the power to say no to bad or abusive relationships. Not all abused spouses will take advantage of this opportunity (financial dependence is only one reason people become trapped in abusive situations) but very many will take advantage of it. Some will take advantage of the flexibility UBI gives them to prosecute the person who tried to victimize them. When they leave and prosecute, they will help change the culture that has been letting men get away with abuse both at home and on the job.
To some extent a UBI could be used to help children who don’t have a parent capable of protecting them from their abuser. Some teenagers would be better off living on their own than with abusive parents. Specially targeted shelters and foster-care arrangements might be even more helpful. Under the current rules, people who run away from abusive parents often find themselves financially dependent on another abusive or exploitive relationship; many of abused teenagers stay where they are and suffer continued abuse until they are legal adults.
A livable UBI would also empower people’s reproductive choices. Society tends to blame infertility issues on women who decide to have children “too late,” but the same society equally tends to blame poverty on women who decide to have children “too soon” before they were financially ready. Yet, we live in an increasingly bifurcated income distribution demanding more-and-more years of schooling, student-debt repayment, and work experience before jobs provide the financial stability people need to start a family. Even then, jobs today demand more-and-more of a worker’s time while still providing little or no support for daycare. Under these conditions, the window between having children “too soon” or “too late” is greatly reduced—sometimes to zero. All of these factors create enormous financial penalties for people who have children in their 20s. Yet, we continue to blame women or couples as if they make choices outside of any social context.
A UBI large enough to lift parents and children out of poverty would help reduce that financial penalty not only directly through the redistribution of property but also indirectly by giving parents the power to demand better wages and working conditions.
Just a few decades ago, the ratio between rent and income was such that many families could afford to live on the income of a single earner. The percentage of families who can afford to do that has been shrinking for decades. UBI can help reverse that trend especially if combined with a better housing policy.
The labor market is structured so that the opportunity to live as two half-time workers who share parenting duties is near zero for most American couples. People might exercise the power UBI gives them to demand these kinds of options.
A livable UBI combined with a good healthcare system, universal (or affordable) daycare, and educational and employment opportunities designed to permit both parents to fully participate in child rearing would help restore the opportunity for couples to choose the time that’s right for them to have children.
People might worry that this policy would lead to a massive increase in fertility. I doubt it, because fertility has been declining in many countries for a long time for many reasons, most of them unrelated to the issues mentioned above. If we need to give people an incentive to limit the number of children they have, we have many options. Perhaps the worst of those options is to force some families into poverty and blame it on women’s “bad choices” while the 1% can have all the children they want and are praised for it, whether or not they participate in the paid labor market or do any of the things people in the 95 or 99% are supposed to do to prove they deserve to be free from poverty.
The final reason we need to empower the 95% with UBI is simple: it is cruel not to. An economic policy to impose work-for-the-privileged-or-be-homeless principle on the vast majority of citizens is self-evidently cruel. The way we treat the supposedly undeserving homeless is cruel. The paternalistic way we treat people who actually meet our criteria for being “truly needy” is cruel. The way we let employers take advantage of people who are under the threat of homelessness is cruel.
To a greater or lesser extent, we all learn cruelty or at least indifference to the cruelty around us. Instead of treating poverty as the problem, we treat poor people—especially from marginalized ethnic groups—as the problem. Instead of focusing on solutions that relieve the suffering of homeless and low-income people, we focus on solutions that keep them as far away from us as possible. We teach our children to step around and ignore homeless people, or we teach them not to go to places where the “bad” and “dangerous” people are. We focus on getting our own children into good schools and teach them to be indifferent to what is happening to children in the bad schools.
The system separates most of us from its cruelest aspects, so that we seldom see how bad it is for migrant laborers, meat packers, and others who work behind the scenes. But anyone who really wants to know can find out how bad it can be.
Better off people risk developing callousness. Robust studies have found upper-class individuals to be “more likely to break the law while driving, … exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies, … take valued goods from others, … lie in a negotiation, … cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize, … and endorse unethical behavior at work … than were lower-class individuals.”[v]
These findings are born out in casual observations of the way many companies have treated vulnerable employees for centuries. Many employers tolerate and protect managers who sexually harass (or do worse to) their underlings. We have health and safety regulations, because employers have a history of being uninterested in paying for safety precautions for laborers who can’t afford to quit unsafe jobs. Recent reports have shown line workers wearing diapers because they are not allowed to take bathroom breaks. We have maximum-workweek and minimum wage legislation because companies have required employees to work 60 or 70 hours per week or more at wages that don’t provide a decent living even at that number of hours. Our legislation specifically exempts agricultural workers and domestic servants from many of our labor-protection laws including the federal minimum wage, probably because we think of people in these jobs as unlike us. We even have a history of slavery and debt bondage. There is simply no limit how cruel we can be to our fellow humans when they have no individual power.
The solution to the cruel aspects of our economic system is to permanently remove everyone from labor-market-dependent powerlessness by introducing a UBI large enough to live on. We need to stop trying to judge disadvantaged people and learn to respect their judgment of the system that privileges others at their expense. If a person living on no more than UBI finds that situation to be a better option than the jobs our society offers them, we should respect their decision. Instead of imagining what’s wrong with them for not taking the offers given to them by the privileged, we should consider what’s wrong with our job offers.
We create a desperate default position; take advantage of that desperation by giving them the crap work nobody else wants to do; and praise ourselves for giving them the opportunity to work their way out of the desperate situation we created for them.
We have many other ways we could incentivize people to do the work we want done. Among these are good pay, good working conditions, and genuine respect. The abhorrent cruelty of our labor market’s default option ought to be reason enough to abolish it directly by introducing a UBI.
UBI won’t stop all the injustices in the labor market, but it will end or reduce an awful long list of them. The economy is not fair. Neither you nor I know how to make it fair. If the game is inherently unfair, the only ethical thing to do is to stop forcing people to play.
[i] http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/odnirast.html
[ii] Widerquist, “The Cost of Basic Income: Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations.”
[iii] Wright, “Basic Income as a Socialist Project”, 19.
[iv] David Calnitsky, “Basic Income and the Pitfalls of Randomization”, 19-20.
[v] Piff et al., “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior.”