Janus debate preview contents:
- The Freedom From Want and Basic Income
- Basic Income as Power to the People
- The Voluntary-Participation ideal
This section argues that, by freeing people from labor-market dependence and establishing a voluntary-participation economy, UBI gives enormous power to they people. It will alter or reverse some of the most harmful power dynamics in the economy today. As I explain the importance of the power freedom form the fear of want gives to common people, it may 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 check each other, and the people check all these powers with their vote. But as disadvantaged citizens throughout the history of democracy can attest, the individual vote of a disadvantaged person has limited value as a check on powerful political and economic 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 candidates who have successfully raised 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 ruling coalition 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 even though sometimes 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 everyone as an individual: 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, but even if the wield it alone or without any coordination with others, it has important, 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. When introducing federal minimum wage legislation, Franklin Roosevelt argued, “[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] More than 90 years later, we still have firms paying less-than-livable wages. That problem will go away we decide that everyone in this country unequivocally free from the fear of homelessness.
If the economy is the mutually beneficial social project people say it is, 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 would 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 90-95% of working-age people are labor-market dependent, the predictable result is lower wages and poorer working conditions than would prevail in a society with genuinely free labor.
Labor market dependence might not bind very noticeably on workers in the upper half of the 99%. Many of us make four-to-ten times what 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 differences between us and people struggle to secure the bare necessities are caused by differences in behavior rather than differences in advantage. 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 much better for us too. While everyone should be ready to make sacrifices to fight injustice against fellow citizens, even very prosperous workers have something to gain from establishing a voluntary-participation economy. Our proudly learned skills don’t give us 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. 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, 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 fear losing, but they are just as important, perhaps more important.
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 with less attractive jobs than yours are better off, you have more power to command good treatment from employers.
Imagine the power common people 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. Workers feel less pressure to stay at jobs where we’re mistreated, underappreciated, and underpaid; less pressure to stay bad jobs until we find a better one; less pressure pass up education and retraining because we can’t afford the time off. The opportunity for owners and managers to get away with sexual harassment, poverty wages, unsafe conditions, and other forms of mistreatment are significantly reduced. The incentive for owners to share the benefits of economic growth with the 99% are greatly increased.
It’s hard to say how far benefits will flow up the income scale, but it could be a lot farther than you might guess from the observation that most workers in the upper half of the income distribution wouldn’t find much attraction in quitting our jobs to live off UBI even temporarily. A well-structured UBI plan would be a net financial benefit to 50-70% of U.S. families even if their wages don’t change at all.[ii] The benefits of collective market power and freedom from fear could extend much farther.
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. UBI reverses that trend both by direct redistribution from the top 1% to the bottom 50-70% and by increasing the market power of the 99% as a whole so that they can command a more equal share of market income as well.
Workers’ power to unionize and conduct strikes will increase enormously with the “inexhaustible strike fund” that a livable UBI provides.[iii] How this power will 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,[iv] because apparently, manufacturers do not want workers to have the power to say no to bad jobs.
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 might be the most successful unions in the United States, even if players might have done very well otherwise.
The power a sufficiently large UBI would give the least-skilled, most easily replaceable workers (such as domestic servants, migrant laborers, and so on) might help them organize effective unions and cooperatives for the first time. Workers would have resources they could pool to support organizing efforts. Unions are most effective in tight labor markets. The least attractive sectors are likely to see the most tightening when UBI is introduced, because they’re the people most likely to use the opportunity to walk.
The biggest power in negotiation goes to the party with the least to lose. Often that’s owners with portable capital and privileged workers with portable savings and skills. Often the people with the most to lose are the least-advantaged workers clinging to their last hope before homelessness. Once that worker has a livable UBI, suddenly they have the least to lose.
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 enhanced power of disadvantaged workers will help them within unions and cooperatives and the power of the unions and cooperatives that are comprised mostly of disadvantaged members relative to those comprised mostly of privileged members. With UBI in place, a person who feels underappreciated by any institution (including a union or a cooperative) can take a sabbatical, look into education and retraining toward a career where people will treat them better. This factor makes UBI important for the least advantaged workers even after union shops and worker-owned cooperatives have come to dominate the economy. More on this issue in section 3.
Opting out can create positive feedback effects in the economy and society. If many workers in one sector opt out—even without any coordination between them—they will give owners and managers in that sector powerful incentives to improve wages and working conditions or perhaps to realize the jobs in this sector aren’t worth doing. Contrary to popular belief that “job creation” is the measure of economic success, an economy with fewer bullshit jobs is better for everyone as long as we all have to power to turn the reduced need for labor into more leisure rather than a desperate search for some other means to obtain food, shelter, and clothing.
The mandatory-participation path to worker empowerment is a convoluted strategy. Step 1: disempower common people by giving control of resources if not to an ownership-class and/or a political power structure. Step 2: reempower newly labor-market dependent individuals by allowing them to join institutions such as labor unions, cooperatives, and political parties, which can fight for access to the resources lost when we privatized the commons.
Labor-market dependence is artificially created. Work has not always been about pleasing bosses and clients so you can pay landlords and banks. We all have ancestors who did not worked for others. Most hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers work with people who were agreeable peers but not for people above them in a hierarchy. The opportunity to work for ourselves was taken away from most of our ancestors during the enclosure movement in Europe and the colonial movement in most other places. The people who privatized the Earth were motivated by the desire to enrich privileged insiders not only by giving them direct control of valuable resources but also by giving them indirect control of commoners by creating labor-market dependence.[v] The voluntary-participation ideal is that any society that forces people off the commons need to do something else (such as introduce a livable UBI) to restore and maintain their independence.
Mandatory-participation supporters have given very little reason to believe the disempowerment-reempowerment strategy as likely to be more effective than the strategy of empowering disadvantaged individuals in every way we can. Even progressive UBI opponents tend to rely instead on the ethical claim of a duty of contribution: that we must give back in labor for what we might get in social support. But we already gave. We gave the resources of the Earth to a powerful authority structure that created a hierarchical reward system that we might well object to. UBI makes the wealthy of the world give back for the disproportionate share of resource they control, use, or use up.
Mandatory-participation supporters often respond by saying that as soon their package of reforms is in place, society will become fair enough that there will be no more reasonable objections to participation. Common people should be skeptical of any decisionmakers who say that they would agree to if they knew better or were more reasonable. We need to respect common people enough to grant them power to decide for themselves in real life whether the labor options available to them are worth taking.
UBI also helps people who we don’t usually expect to labor and who are incapable of forming a union, such as abused spouses (usually women), children, and parents of children who are being abused, neglected, or exploited by the other parent or another person. 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. Financial dependence is not the only reason people become trapped in abusive situations, but it is a centrally important reason. So, I expect UBI to lead to large reduction in abuse and an increase in women pursing prosecution of abusers. People who leave and prosecute will help change the culture that lets men get away with abuse both at home and on the job.
To some extent, 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 suing for emancipation and living off UBI than remaining in abusive situations. Specially targeted shelters and foster-care arrangements might become more viable if a dependent child’s UBI can be redirected. I don’t know what the rules for children should be, but I know that, under current rules, people who run away from abusive parents often find themselves financially dependent on another abusive or exploitive relationship and that many 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” while simultaneously blaming child-poverty issues on women who decide to have children “too soon.” Yet, we live in an increasingly bifurcated economy that demands 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 demand more-and-more of a worker’s time while 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. 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. 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. 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 their choices were outside all social context.
A UBI large enough to lift parents and children out of poverty would help reduce that financial penalty directly through the redistribution of property and indirectly by giving parents power to demand better wages and parent-friendly working conditions. It would, therefore, help couples to choose the time that’s right for them to have children, especially if it is combined with better housing policy, universal healthcare, and universal or affordable daycare.
People might worry that this policy would lead to a massive increase in fertility. I doubt it. Fertility has been declining in many countries for a long time for many reasons, many 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 options is to force some families into poverty and blame it on women’s “bad choices” while praising the 1% for having all the children they want, whether or not they do any of the things common people are supposed to do to prove we deserve to be free from poverty.
One reason to empower the people with UBI is simple: it is cruel not to. The work-for-the-privileged-or-be-homeless principle is in-itself cruel. The way we treat the supposedly undeserving homeless is cruel. The way we let employers take advantage of people facing the threat of homelessness is cruel. The paternalistic way we treat people who actually meet our criteria for being “truly needy” 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, our policies focus on keeping low-income people as far away from more privileged people as possible and thereby make life worse for the disadvantaged. We focus on getting our own children into good schools and teach them to be indifferent to the “bad” and “dangerous” children we presume are found in 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.
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.”[vi]
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) underlings. Health and safety regulations exist partly 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 lack the power to demand bathroom breaks. We have maximum-workweek and minimum wage legislation because workers lack the power refuse companies that require employees to work 60 or 70 hours per week or more at wages that don’t provide a decent living even at that pace. We have a history of slavery and debt bondage. There is simply no limit how cruel people can be to powerless people.
The solution to the cruelty of our economic system is to stop trying to judge disadvantaged people and learn to respect their judgment of the system that privileges others at their expense. 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 people in it the crap work nobody else wants to do; and praise ourselves for providing them with the opportunity to work their way out of the situation we created for them.
We have many other ways we could incentivize people to do the work we want done. These include 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 UBI.
Creating a voluntary-participation economy by introducing a livable UBI won’t end all economic injustices, but it will reduce a long list of them. The economy is not fair. Neither you nor I know how to make it fair. If you don’t know how to make the game fair, the ethical thing to do is to stop forcing people to play.
– Karl Widerquist, Al Najada Hotel Apartments, March 31, 2025 (revised, May 24, 2025, Lowfield Houe Morehead City, NC)
AUTHOR’S NOTE: this is an early draft of a section in a book I’m working on. I’m interested in any helpful feedback.
[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] Widerquist and McCall, The Prehistory of Private Property.
[vi] Piff et al., “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior.”