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The idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is gaining more attention. With a UBI, the government would give every adult the same fixed, monthly payment regardless of work status, health, or wealth. There are serious reasons to be cautious about UBI:

It is offered as a solution to technological unemployment, but jobs aren’t disappearing; rather, work is changing. A quarter century after the digital revolution began, the economy now employs 37 million more people and offers a record-high 6 million job openings.

At first blush, universal basic income (UBI) seems a very attractive idea, especially to a progressive.  Yet it suffers from two serious problems.  First, the odds are very high that an effort to secure UBI would prove quixotic.  Second, and more disconcerting, any possibility of overcoming the formidable obstacles to UBI will almost certainly require a left-right coalition that has significant conservative support — and conservative support for UBI rests on an approach that would increase poverty, rather than reduce it.

The key issues related to UBI include what it would cost, how it would be paid for, and the risks it poses.  Let’s take these one at a time.

Want to help low-income families rise out of poverty?  Connect key welfare benefits with work and “make work pay” by offering subsidies for those who get a job. That’s basically been the anti-poverty policy consensus on the left and right since welfare reform in the 1990s. And as recent  have shown, the pro-work strategy worked. When poverty is calculated in terms of what Americans consume (which implicitly captures all the government benefits the “official” poverty measure ), “consumption poverty” continues to fall to historic .

But policymakers never rest, especially when fears of a looming  can be leveraged to create new government programs. That’s behind the latest hot topic in anti-poverty policy — “universal basic income” or UBI. UBI forms the heart of outsider democrat Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign, and Marianne Williamson recently jumped on board the  as well. With them  several DC insiders, expect more focus on UBI ahead.

Since carbon tax is regressive, the initial burden of the Just Energy Transition falls disproportionately on the indigent people within these countries, which should be avoided. “Given the increasing inequality within the economies, it is best to formulate taxes within these individual economies based on their consumption pattern across the classes and also to formulate a policy mechanism by which the poor in these countries can be shielded from the added burden of this tax.”308 Other major studies also found that if all countries adopt the necessary uniform global carbon tax and return the revenues to their citizens on an equal per capita basis, it will be possible to meet a 2 °C target while increasing wellbeing, reducing inequality, and alleviating poverty.309 Thus, it is possible for a society to implement strong climate action without compromising their goals for equity and development. Furthermore, the benefits are often large, particularly for those at the lower end of the income distribution. The overall benefits to society are even greater if total carbon tax revenues are returned on an equal per capita basis globally, which directs more of the revenues towards the poorest populations in the world (rather than solely the poorest within each country or region).310 In fact, many recent models have ignored the possibility that the revenues from a carbon tax could be used in a progressive way that generates immediate net benefits for the poor.311 It has been an “important oversight” that progressive revenue recycling models have not been incorporated into the policy analysis at a global level.312 Instead, research has often presumed that climate action must harm the current poor, where the opposite is actually the case.313 Moving forward, action and further research on carbon taxation must account for and correct this built-in bias against mitigation. Examining the impact of the equal per capita refund on all income groups in the United States, China, and India—chosen to represent countries at all levels of wealth—shows that more than half of the population (namely those in the lower income groups) benefits in the short-term—specifically those in the bottom quintile.314 In India, the lowest 40% of their population never experience any loss at all.315 This monetary distribution has a positive effect on alleviating poverty.316 A study focusing on the continent of Africa also demonstrates the potential for positive impact both on overall carbon reductions and poverty alleviation. This study assumed a $75 per ton carbon tax, which is the benchmark tax estimated by the International Monetary Fund to keep global warming below 2 ºC.317 This would increase fuel prices at the pump by $0.17 per liter. 318 When multiplied by current oil consumption in Africa—approximately 4 million barrels per day—the policy would generate $40 billion in additional annual tax revenue across the continent.319 Although such a tax may seem regressive at first, “if revenues are used for pro-poor redistribution policies, the result would actually be progressive because the lowest-income households consume significantly less fuel than wealthier ones.”320 Of the African countries, only South Africa’s carbon tax is expected to be regressive.321 In Gabon, Cameron, and Morocco, the effect of the tax on the lowest income groups is expected to be lower compared to the rest of the continent.322 However, elsewhere on the continent, carbon taxes can directly reduce income inequality via effective redistribution.323 Carbon reduction strategies are especially important in Africa because their aggregate carbon emissions have approximately doubled since 1990.324 This trend commonly occurs for nations in the initial stages of development. This is still troublesome given the duality of climate change and the need to develop not only African countries, but also many other regions and nations around the world. One major problem with a global approach to emission reductions via a carbon tax is that it might not be supported by local politicians who are subject to short election cycles. However, local offsets create tangible local benefits.325 Local offsets would support jobs, promote economic development, and benefit the local environment. 326 These outcomes gain valuable political support. For example, a significant number of carbon offsets in California come from lands managed by the Yurok tribe, a Native American tribe in Northern California.327 Although some tribal members initially opposed the use of offsets since they perceived them to be a type of environmental injustice or neocolonial exploitation of the natural world, the offsets have become a significant share of the tribe’s discretionary income in addition to a visible force in state politics.328 Thus, when push comes to shove, the market philosophy of “shop the world” seems to give way to “buy local.”329 Carbon offsets have greater political support when they create local benefits, no matter the quality or price of those offsets.330 Restricting far-flung offsets faces fewer political barriers than would limits that restrain domestic offset benefits.331 In short, politicians prefer projects that deliver local economic, environmental, and political benefits.

A recent Democrat proposal, the Grow American Incomes Now Act of 2017 (H.R. 3757), would increase the maximum benefit and expand eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)—a program in desperate need of reform. Already expanded several times since its 1975 enactment, the EITC provides refundable tax credits for low- and moderate-income households. Because the credit is refundable, if the amount of the credit which varies by family size and income exceeds federal income taxes owed, beneficiaries receive a check for the difference. Therefore, the EITC is mostly reflected as spending in the federal budget. Expanding EITC Would Bust the Federal Budget. The Grow American Incomes Now Act of 2017 would lead to a drastic rise in federal spending by substantially increasing the maximum credit for families with three or more children from $6,431 to $12,131. H.R. 3757 would also increase the maximum credit for childless adults almost six-fold, rising from a benefit of $510 under current law to $3,000. Additionally, under this proposal, the EITC phaseout would be extended to higher income ranges than current law, raising EITC availability from households earning $55,000 to those earning $76,000. Finally, H.R. 3757 lowers the age of eligibility from 25 today to 21.1 Ultimately, these EITC expansions would cost $1.4 trillion over ten years,2 plus $258 billion of net interest costs for a total of $1.658 trillion over the same period. This new spending is in addition to $9.4 trillion of anti-poverty mandatory spending projected over the next decade. Expanding EITC is Unworkable. There is no doubt that the EITC helps countless American families by providing support to working parents. However, the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates an EITC improper payment rate of 24 percent for fiscal year 2017, 3 equating to $16 billion in program fraud and abuses. Further, even without expanding the EITC, the Federal Government has grown mandatory means-tested programs by 73 percent since 2008. Of this total, CBO projects refundable tax credits, the EITC being the most significant, will cost $80 billion in 2018. If implemented, the Grow American Incomes Now Act of 2017 would roughly triple the annual cost of the EITC to $210 billion and increase eligibility by 81 percent to 47 million people. 4 Republican Solutions for Enhancing Wages. Fixing the EITC so that it works better for America’s families must come before increasing it. Without significant reform, adding 21 million people to a broken EITC program would be irresponsible. The Federal Government already spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year on antipoverty mandatory programs. While these programs and the EITC are important, the key to improving middle-class wages is a strong, growing economy and a competitive labor market. By removing burdensome regulations and supporting pro-growth policies like tax reform, Republicans in Congress are achieving these goals and have built the strongest economy in decades. Unemployment is at 3.7 percent—the lowest level in almost 50 years. Median household income rose to $61,372 in 2017— up 10 percent from just three years ago.5 And hourly wages are up 2.8 percent over the past year.6 Government wage subsidies can complement a growing economy but enacting pro-growth policies that allow the free market to raise wages and grow a prosperous middle class will pay dividends that no federal program can achieve.

We find that the EITC helps “pay for itself” through increases in tax revenue and decreases in government transfers in the following year. Average-treatment-effect estimates show that the EITC has a self-financing rate of 83 percent, so that each $1 of EITC spending has a net budgetary cost to government of $0.17. Instead of costing $73 billion, the 2017 EITC’s net cost was about $12 billion, costing taxpayers less than the school lunch and breakfast programs. If anything, the EITC’s net cost appears to be zero or even negative when longer-run and spillover effects are accounted for.

We find that recent EITC expansions also continue to largely pay for themselves. Additional EITC expansions today—for adults with or without children—would likely continue to increase labor supply, decrease poverty, and improve the well-being of lower-income families at a cost much lower than the budgetary cost.

For decades, the American economic system and other institutions meant to support economic mobility have largely failed the tens of millions of people in the country who experience poverty every year—and the U.S. tax code is no exception. Many aspects of the current tax code perpetuate structural sexism and racism, and even provisions intended to support low-income people and families exclude the poorest and most vulnerable.1 However, the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion stimulus package centered on broad emergency relief in response to the coronavirus pandemic, makes important temporary changes to the child tax credit (CTC) and earned income tax credit (EITC) that begin to solve this problem. But in order for those changes to have a long-term impact and better support families with children and low-wage workers, they must be made permanent.2

The American Rescue Plan temporarily expands the CTC, extending it in full to low- and middle-income families and paying out the credit periodically instead of as a single lump sum. Specifically, the bill:

After Social Security, the earned income tax credit (EITC) is America’s largest antipoverty program. The refundable tax credit supports low- and middle-income families, lifting nearly  out of poverty each year.

But childless workers, including noncustodial parents, are largely excluded from the program’s benefits. In 2017, the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimated that  were distributed to families with children.

The EITC in its current form provides moderate income support to parents of minor children and has the strength of creating work incentives for very low-income workers, but it is criticized for (i) creating disincentives to work when the credit is being “phased out;” (ii) creating perverse incentives with respect to family structure and insufficiently supporting childless workers and noncustodial parents; (iii) being hampered by administrative complexity and delay; and (iv) being too small to eradicate poverty, especially for childless workers. Happily, all four of these criticisms could be addressed in an expanded EITC that functions more like a UBI. This section discusses how. The first proposal is perhaps the most radical, and (for that reason?) has not been advocated in any of the existing proposals to reform the EITC that I know of, but it would have some very significant benefits. That reform is to remove the phase-out of the benefit, so once a worker earned sufficient income to qualify for the maximum credit, they would receive it no matter how high their income got during the year. The primary benefit of such a structure is that it would remove the concentrated work disincentives (the “poverty trap”) caused by the phase-out of the benefit.212 It would also dramatically simplify the administrative burden because the government would not need to withdraw benefits as income rises in the phase-out range.213 Once it was determined that a recipient earned enough to qualify for the full credit, both the recipient and the government could rely on the fact that the recipient qualified for the full credit, without any concern that future earnings would reduce the credit the recipient was due.214 This reform would make further reforms described later much easier to implement, especially distributing the benefit monthly instead of annually. As discussed above, UBI advocates argue that a universal benefit with no phase-out is superior to a means-tested benefit for two primary reasons. First, removing the phase-out eradicates the poverty trap by eliminating the work disincentives created by phasing out the benefit.215 Second, removing the phase-out dramatically simplifies the administration of a benefit program.216

Both of these arguments in favor of a non-means-tested program apply in the case of the EITC.217 With respect to the work disincentive created by the phase-out of the EITC, first it is important to point out that the majority of EITC claimants are in the phase-out range.218 Thus—at least theoretically—the EITC should disincentivize work for many more recipients than for those whose labor participation is incentivized.219 In fact, for three quarters of all EITC recipients, the credit serves as a disincentive to earn additional income (because they are in the phase-out range) rather than an incentive, although the magnitude of the disincentive is very hard to assess.220 There is some consensus among economists doing empirical work that the phase-in of the EITC increases labor participation by single mothers, persuading some mothers who are not earning money to work in the market economy.221 But the economic literature attempting to assess the disincentive effect of the phase-out range is much more complicated and does not result in any clear findings.222 Therefore, it is not clear how substantial the disincentive effect of the EITC phase-out is. However, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the EITC phase-out acts as a disincentive to work as much as a 21.6% additional marginal income tax rate would, if you assume that the phase-out and the tax are equally salient to the worker.223 The administrative simplification that comes from removing the EITC phase-out is not so impressive when discussed in isolation. The EITC is already administered through the tax code, and the information determining level of qualification is collected on an income tax return. If there was no phase-out, taxpayers would still need to collect the same information about income that they do currently, since they would still need to file a full income-tax return in order to claim the reformed EITC. The fact that they could be confident throughout the year that additional earnings would not disqualify them for EITC benefits might have incentive effects but would not really simplify filing much. At best, it might encourage some recipients to file, even if they might have avoided filing currently, because they erroneously believed that they earned too much to qualify.

Economists since Adam Smith have marveled at the potential magic of unconstrained competitive markets. Under certain conditions, markets can efficiently allocate resources in such a way that no intervention could make anyone better off without making someone else worse off. Those preconditions are routinely violated in the real world, but the free enterprise system produces a dizzying array of products and gets them to consumers around the world who are willing and able to pay for them. In the process, it produces an enormous amount of wealth. The problem is that the gains from economic activity are increasingly concentrated in a sliver of the population. Half of the population has seen little increase in real wages for decades. This raises normative issues about the desirability of our economic system, but even people with a high tolerance for inequality might be concerned that a system that increasingly leaves most voters behind is not politically sustainable over the long run. This article develops a straightforward correction to wage stagnation: a refundable wage tax credit, which I call a universal earned income tax credit (UEITC). The credit would match earnings up to a maximum amount. I illustrate two variants: a 100 percent credit on earnings up to $10,000 plus a $2,500 fully refundable child tax credit; and a 50 percent credit on earnings up to $14,000 plus a fully refundable $2,000 per person (adults and children) universal basic income (UBI). The cost of the new tax credits could be offset by a dedicated tax—either a broad-based, value-added tax (VAT) of 11 percent or a surtax of 12 percent of taxable income. The maximum credit would be indexed to economic growth as measured by GDP per capita. For the first time in decades, low- and middle-income workers would share in economic gains even if the factors suppressing market wages do not reverse. Workers at all income levels, rather than only the highest earners, would benefit from economic prosperity, finally fulfilling John F. Kennedy’s promise that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” A substantial wage subsidy is more efficient and direct than the trade and immigration restrictions currently favored by the right and the regulatory responses advanced by the left. Polls show that the public strongly supports assisting working people. The earned income tax credit (EITC), which provides a substantial wage subsidy for lower-income families with children, has garnered broad bipartisan support. But the EITC provides little or no support for workers without children at home or for families with somewhat higher earnings. The proposed UEITC would replace the EITC and provide meaningful assistance for low- and middle-income workers whether or not they have children living with them. Unlike the EITC, the UEITC would not directly penalize two-earner couples. Because the wage credit is universal and refundable (that is, it does not phase out with income and workers can receive it even if they do not owe income taxes), workers could safely request an advance payment from an employer. Self-employed workers and those with multiple employers would ultimately claim the credit less any advance payments on income tax returns. Like other income, but unlike the EITC and most other tax credits, the UEITC would be subject to income taxes. A UEITC would also beeasier for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to administer than the current EITC because eligibility would be simpler to determine. All adults with earnings would be eligible for the UEITC. The proposed options are quite progressive. Low- and middle-income workers would receive far more in tax credits than they would pay in additional taxes. I assume the new credits and their dedicated funding sources would phase in and the EITC would phase out between 2020 and 2023. In 2023, when fully phased in, the proposals would cut average tax bills for most people in the four lowest income quintiles. The federal tax cut for the bottom quintile would average about $3,800 to $4,500 (23.2 to 27.8 percent of after-tax income), depending on the option chosen. The tax cut for the middle quintile would average $2,600 to $3,100 (4.2 to 5.1 percent of after-tax income). High-income people would pay more because the VAT burden or surtax increase with income. The tax increase on the top quintile would average between $12,000 and $22,000 (4.7 to 8.0 percent of after-tax income). The tax burden on the top 1 percent of earners would increase by 7.5 to 13.8 percent of after-tax income ($128,000 to $235,000). By convention, the static distributional estimates ignore behavioral responses, but those responses increase the overall benefit for low-wage workers. Because the proposal significantly increases the reward to working, some individuals would choose to enter the work force or work more hours, raising their income. Over the long run, they would accumulate more human capital (job skills) that would increase their productivity and, thus, wages. The increased labor supply could depress wages, but evidence from the EITC suggests that this effect is small. Watson (2020) estimates that the EITC increases workers’ welfare by more than the static estimates despite a substantial labor supply response.1 An alternative to the UEITC, which received a boost from Andrew Yang’s presidential primary campaign, would be a UBI alone. The UEITC provides no benefit to people who are out of the work force. However, work-based subsidies have strong political advantages. The UEITC and enhanced CTC are targeted at workers and families with children, two groups that many Democrats and Republicans are willing to support. The public is wary of assisting able-bodied adults who do not work. Eighty-seven percent of respondents in a recent poll supported work requirements for public assistance programs (Doar, Bowman, and O’Neil, 2016). Section II describes the motivation for the study, explaining the challenges facing lower- and middle-class workers and why a wage subsidy could mitigate those challenges. Section III describes the proposal in detail, compares the UEITC and enhanced CTC or UBI to the current-law EITC and CTC, summarizes the distributional and revenue effects of the proposed reforms using the Tax Policy Center’s microsimulation tax model, and discusses the overall economic effects. Section IV compares the UEITC variants with other reform options and considers several possible complementary policy changes. Section V offers some conclusions. The proposals are designed to achieve four objectives: (1) Mitigate rising economic inequality and wage stagnation; (2) Broadly share the gains from economic growth; (3) Support work and families; and (4) Be available to anyone who works. Below, I outline the positive arguments for objectives 1 through 3 and the political rationale for objective 4. While much of the recent policy debate has been devoted to rising economic inequality in the United States, the more salient and politically destabilizing factor may be the sense among middle-income workers that they can’t get ahead. 2 Median real wages for full-time male workers have barely budged in 40 years (figure 1). That conclusion is only slightly dampened when wages are indexed by the deflator for personal consumption expenditures (PCE), which allows for more substitution among consumption items. Median wages understate compensation because of the exclusion of fringe benefits, especially the value of employer-sponsored health insurance (Schieber and Nyce, 2018). However, it is scant consolation to the typical worker that all pay increases since the 1970s have gone to cover the cost of increasingly expensive health insurance. Recent political discourse has blamed trade and immigration as the main culprits for stagnant wages, but many economists believe that technology is a prime factor (Krueger, 2012; Summers, 2013). 3 The growing availability of machine substitutes for human labor depresses wages. For example, cashiers now compete with self-checkout machines. The cashier’s wages will depend only on how much it costs to purchase and operate the machine equivalent. As the price of the machine falls and quality improves, there will be more and more downward pressure on wages. Muro, Maxim, and Whiton (2019) conclude that all occupations will be affected by automation in the future, although the extent of exposure will vary widely. Skilled workers are not exempt. Frey andOsborne (2013) predict that skilled laborers, such as lawyers, accountants, and economists, will also soon face steep competition from computers.4 Autor and Dorn (2013) develop the implications in a model where technology substitutes for workers engaged in routine tasks in the manufacturing sector, but less so for those with higher skills and for low-skilled workers in the service sector. Computers compete for routine tasks performed by production workers (for example, robots replace assemblers and painters in an automobile plant), but they are less useful as substitutes for low-skilled workers in service jobs. The demand for services has increased dramatically since the 1970s, which has increased wages and employment at the bottom of the skill distribution because many service-sector jobs are not easily mechanized, but computers have driven down demand for workers performing routine tasks. The robots have made managers and other highskilled workers more productive because firms can now produce more with less labor. Autor and Dorn argue that this explains patterns in both employment and earnings since 1980, and they rule out globalization as an alternative explanation. If automation of routine tasks is the prime explanation for wage stagnation, these patterns are likely to persist. Wage stagnation might simply represent a transitional problem as we adjust to new technology. Past waves of technological change initially cost jobs but ultimately vastly improved middle-class workers’ living standards. (Allen 2007) However, the historical context is much different now. The 30 years preceding the current malaise corresponded to very rapid real wage increases, and American workers might not be willing to wait decades more for the economy to fully adapt to new technology. The success of populist presidential candidates who proposed radical policies to help the middle class in the 2016 election—Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders—is evidence of growing impatience with workingclass wage stagnation.5 However, computers and robotics are getting cheaper and better at a remarkable rate. Many activities that reach a large enough scale to overcome the fixed costs of investment in automation will be automated and many workers displaced. Low- and medium-skilled human workers will still be valuable in small-scale start-up enterprises and in some kinds of service jobs, but 21st century workers will need to be highly adaptable and may find themselves in places where only low-wage jobs are available.6This trend might be exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic for at least two reasons. First, robots don’t get sick (Bloom and Prettner, 2020).7 Second, the economic collapse accompanying the pandemic disproportionately hurt smaller businesses, which are the least likely to automate.8 The new economy with more economic activity in large businesses will automate faster. Other factors also contribute to wage stagnation. In addition to trade, immigration, and technology, Clausing (2019) identifies declining unionization, the diminishing real value of the federal minimum wage, rent seeking, a winner-take-all economy, and tax policy as important factors in wage stasis. Baker (2016) argues that misguided public policies promote economic concentration, rent seeking, and outsize executive compensation at the expense of rank-and-file workers. Reversing the policies that tilt the economy in favor of the rich would raise incomes for the bottom 99 percent, but those policies have powerful advocates. Raising minimum wages and repealing antilabor laws could similarly help some low- and middle-income workers, but vigorous debate persists in the economics literature about the costs and effectiveness of such policies.9 The evidence, therefore, suggests that wage stagnation is real and unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Assuming the economy continues to grow, that means middle-class workers’ relative position will continue to erode compared with those at the top of the income distribution. This dynamic will become increasingly politically unstable over time. Middle-class malaise creates a growing risk of populist responses such as trade barriers, immigration bans, and burdensome wage and employment regulations that could harm the economy (Burman, 2013). Such responses might cause the middle-income worker’s position to rise in relative, but not absolute, terms. Inequality would diminish, but everyone could end up worse off. Developing an efficient compensation mechanism that would induce middle-class voters to endorse pro-growth policies could thus benefit all income groups. Value judgments aside, there is a positive economic argument for developing efficient public policies to address middle-class wage stagnation directly because they may be necessary to permit progrowth policies to survive.

Ailsa McKay (2005) has made the case that a universal basic income could address the gender inequality around care. Unlike traditional welfare systems it would not separate out women’s work. The benefit of a basic income is that it would break the link between income and work. Paid work would not be the criterion of inclusion; instead, there would be a basic right to livelihood through money distribution. The benefit of a basic income is that it would not just apply to care work but would be available to everyone. It would be universal and unconditional. As Annie Miller (2016) argues, a basic income ‘provides a foundation for a different type of society, which values the individual, helping [them] him or her to meet material needs and offering choices and the opportunity to develop and flourish’ (2016: 174). The choice a basic income would open up is not just payment for care work; it could also reduce dependence on earning money. This might enable (and encourage) men to participate in unpaid provisioning work. Caitlin McLean (2016) sees ethical, economic and political benefits and problems for a basic income. Ethically it could encourage individual freedom but might limit reciprocity and collective endeavour. Economically it could address inequality and provide a means of livelihood, but traditional economic thinking raises questions of economic feasibility and impact on employment incentives. Political implementation would not be easy given the neoliberal attack on the welfare state and challenge to existing welfare benefits. However, there are some contemporary examples. Iran and the state of Alaska in the US have a form of basic income (2016: 182). Hanlon et al. (2010) also report examples of money distribution in South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico, although these are not universal as they are targeted to alleviate poverty. Paradoxically, the economic crisis and market failures of neoliberalism have opened up the potential for a basic income, with countries such as Finland and The Netherlands conducting experiments.

At the end of The Problem with Work, Weeks’ argument drives towards the notion of a basic income and a call for shorter working hours. Calls for basic income have circulated since the sixteenth century,Footnote5 and in the contemporary period arguments about uncoupling income from the wage system have been part of national debate since the 1960’s in the U.S., and the 1980’s in Northern Europe. The idea behind the basic income is that a universal basic payment is made for participation in the production of value, above and beyond what wages can measure and reward. Weeks’ real innovation, however, which she mentions in the closing pages of the book, and therefore remains an intriguing opening rather than a fully worked through theory, is to rethink the common production of value, and substitute for value the common reproduction of life. The ‘life’ that Weeks substitutes for ‘value’ is the life alluded to in the colloquial phrase ‘get a life’. She acknowledges that ‘life’ does not lie outside of biopower, and is neither exterior to work, nor captured by the notion of life that proliferates in vitalist philosophies that emerge from a Spinozist tradition of thought. Rather ‘life’ refers to the notion of striving for a ‘full life’ that is ‘common to and shared with others without being the same as others’ (Weeks Citation2011, 232). A ‘full life’ would include, but not be subsumed by reproduction or work. By considering life as a counterpoint to value, she suggests a political project that might frame the antiwork critiques and postwork imaginaries represented by demands for basic income and shorter hours:

Perhaps more important from the point of view of my argument, the collective effort to get a life can serve as a way both to contest the existing terms of the work society and to struggle to build something new. (Weeks Citation2011, 233)

My aim here is to open up the notion of the ‘postmaternal’ through bringing it into some kind of proximity with Weeks’ (Citation2011) concept ‘postwork’. ‘Postwork’ is a rather different attempt to respond to some of the same problematics that Stephens identifies in the ways work and care (or social reproduction) have become so separated from one another, and draws on 1970s Marxist feminist texts about wages for housework to reanimate a utopian demand for a postwork politics. In bringing these two terms into relation with one another I’m seeking to think with and against the postmaternal, by suggesting, with Weeks, that there is a strategic need for making certain demands in the name of both social reproduction and work, that go beyond the neomaternalism (albeit a feminist one) that underpins Stephens’ analysis of the postmaternal discourses that surely do surround us. However, the thrust of my argument is that we also need to continue to prize open the implications of using mothering to signify the tripartite conjunction of care, nurture and the management of states of dependency when we make arguments about work and care in public life. Mothering may include practices of care and nurturance, but it also concerns the daily management and experience, for those who mother, of hatred, aggression, guilt, fear, frustration, violence and despair, that have some relation, even if a retroactive and indirect one, to early experiences of being mothered (Kraemer Citation1996; Lewis Citation2009; Parker Citation1995; Stone Citation2011). I aim, therefore, to track across psychoanalytic and social theory, trying to keep open the meanings of ‘the maternal’, not simply in order to de-gender or denaturalise care, but to remind ourselves of the implications of ‘forgetting’ that love and hate are always bound up with one another. If we think about the maternal as a principle or model in social and psychic life that speaks to this impossibility of love without hate, an impossibility that has the potential to mobilise guilt, gratitude, and reparative wishes (if we follow Melanie Klein’s thinking about early object relations), then we might instigate a pathway from a social analysis of the ‘unmothering’ of society, to a more nuanced understanding of both motherhood, and broader ideas about the social good. Weeks seeks to address the problem of waged labour, and its implications for social reproduction by exploring the notion of a basic income for the common production of value. ‘Postwork’ undoes the relation between wage and labour through an analysis of social reproduction in neoliberal conditions, calling not just for the common production of value but for a basic income for the common reproduction of ‘life’ (Weeks Citation2011, 230). Weeks’ appeal to sharing the responsibility for reproducing ‘life’ rather than value maintains a relation between work and reproduction that is neither maternalist, nor occludes the possibility of such labour emanating from a demand for a form of reparation, understood both in the sense of financial recompense and in the sense of ‘repair’. This may provide us with a more radical model for rethinking a feminist maternalism that includes, but is not subsumed by, a politics of care. One element of my argument is that whilst the notion of sharing the reproduction of ‘life’ may serve us well as a figuration of the maternal that allows care to circulate as everybody’s business, we need to make sure that such a project also entails an engagement with what works against life, the ‘hostility to life’, as Derrida (Citation1995) puts it, or in Freud’s terms, simply the death drive.

The idea at the heart of proposals for a Universal Basic Income is that the state provides all citizens, regardless of their financial situation, with a guaranteed income on an ongoing basis that they may spend as they wish. The idea of a UBI, or something approximating it, is not new. John Lanchester points towards Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, as offering an early instance, and something like the idea was “very much alive in the early second half of the twentieth century,” in the work of figures as disparate as Martin Luther King Jr. and the Chicago School neoliberal Friedrich Hayek (Lanchester 2019; Bidadanure 2019, 482). It was considered by the Black Panther Party as a way to address racial discrimination in the USA (challenging the power of the “malfare” states Threadcraft describes) and by feminists involved in the Wages for Housework movement who discussed an income separate from labour as a way of challenging the hegemony of the male breadwinner model (Threadcraft 2016, 156; Dalla Costa and James 1975). Normative discussions of 7 The Politics of Holding 207 UBI took shape in the early 1990s, and in recent years, the concept has been of interest to post-Marxist scholars concerned with the futures of work and care (Parijs 1992; Weeks 2011). In recent years, there have been trials of UBI around the world, including recent plans for a pilot scheme in Wales focusing on care leavers (Goodman et al. 2021; Morris 2021). Whilst there are many different arguments for UBI, and debates about the relationship between the provision of UBI and public services (Parijs 1992; Lanchester 2019; Stronge 2020), I want to focus on developing a perspective that centralises the psychosocial meanings and theorises the potential psychic effects of this kind of provision, whilst at the same time keeping the relationship between these factors and political economy, anti-capitalism and social change in view. The idea of a UBI, that all citizens should receive a specific sum of money from the state regardless of their means, may in fact constitute a “holding” form of care very different from contemporary welfare regimes. As was discussed in Chapter 4, the post-war welfare state was designed to offer protection against the “five great evils” of society, namely want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. It recognised the effects of insecurity, acknowledging and meeting needs for dependence and support. As discussed in Chapter 6, in more recent decades, however, under the auspices of neoliberal thinking, the welfare state has been reconceived through the lens of an ideology of personal responsibility, eschewing public responsibility for care and exhibiting a hatred for dependency (Hoggett 2000). There have been hand ups not hand outs, and the production of subjects fit for work. Welfare has been conceived in terms of an exchange; support is given on the expectation that something will be received in return, namely productivity. Help is not provided simply because need exists, and dependence implies the need for care. Contrastingly, Hoggett points to the fact that UBI “is non-conditional.” He continues: There is no means-testing nor any set of obligations attached to it. Van Parijs argues that as such it maximises the possibilities for ‘real freedom,’ a society in which each individual has the greatest opportunity to do whatever she might want to do including, in his by now famous example, the opportunity to spend every day surfing if this is what she wished. In 208 J. Kellond other words a citizen’s income assumes the form of a gift that seeks no return. (2000, 206) Conceptualising UBI in this way, as a gift that seeks no return, evokes the psychosocial meanings of the post-war welfare state described by Steedman, a form of public and collective concern capable of producing confidence in one’s right to exist (1986, 121–22). UBI, like the postwar welfare state, involves the recognition and meeting of need. Richard Norman defines need in terms of “deficiencies in respect to well-being” (1992, 141). UBI provides the means to satisfy the basic needs that most impede well-being, the five great evils identified by the welfare state. Recently, Guy Standing has cast UBI in similar but updated terms, positioning it as a response to Battling Eight Giants of contemporary society: inequality, insecurity, debt, stress, precarity, automation, populism and extinction (2020). As a response to need that seeks nothing in return, UBI constitutes a form of holding-care that evokes, whilst also transcending, the ethos of the post-war welfare state. UBI eschews the responsibilising demands of an insurance or assetbased welfare system, which make care conditional, restricting it to those who have contributed “enough” (an implicitly anti-immigrant position) or dependent on forms of self-management and economic advantage not available to all. It also departs from the punitive and invasive approaches to assessing claims for support that have become the norm since the imposition of austerity policies (Gentleman 2011). Lanchester points to the fact that for Van Parijs, one of the key figures in debates about the normative basis for introducing a UBI, the initiative offers “freedom from anxiety, from the often humiliating and chaotic process of applying for means-tested benefits in a welfare state, from the need to take demeaning or exhausting or damagingly precarious work” (2019). The freedom from anxiety that UBI could offer evokes its capacity to function as a means of holding-care. By providing a form of holding, UBI mitigates the experience of anxiety and facilitates going-on-being. This, in turn, has the capacity to support psychic growth. To restate Groarke’s articulation on this, “growth depends on ‘the actual mother’ being in a position to meet the absolute dependence of ‘the actual infant’ at the beginning; in which case a sense of inner security arises based on the 7 The Politics of Holding 209 reliability of ‘holding’” (2014, 18). Though citizens are not babies, UBI would involve the state in meeting needs for dependence both in adult citizens and in the children and others they may care for. Offering a form of non-intrusive support that meets needs for dependence and enables the continuity of being, UBI could well provide a context more amenable to psychological growth than existing forms of provision. As Groarke highlights, spontaneity flourishes when the framework holds up. Lisa Baraitser notes that UBI occupies an important place within a post-work politics that appreciates the disciplinary function of waged work and its historical role in the privatisation of caring and reproductive labour (Baraitser 2016; Weeks 2011). “Postwork,” Baraitser glosses, “undoes the relation between wage and labour through an analysis of social reproduction in neoliberal conditions, calling not just for the common production of value but for a basic income for the common reproduction of ‘life’” (2016, 395). Emphasising that the idea of a UBI “allows care to circulate as everybody’s business,” Baraitser also highlights the psychic dimension of the reproduction of life that such a strategy would foreground (396). “A postwork notion of care requires not just the reorganisation of the social reproduction of ‘life,’” she writes, “but the time it takes to live out the complexities of caring relations, and the development of capacities that may enable the reparation of psychic life” (396). This is a formulation that evokes the holding character of UBI as capable of bringing about psychic change, potentially repairing damaged experience. In a slightly different formulation, Baraitser reiterates the time it takes “for the emergence of the capacity for reparation in psychic life” (406). Here, the emphasis falls on the need to acknowledge the time of unfolding, the time of relationships and intersubjective exchange through which the capacity for what Klein calls reparation, and Winnicott concern, characterised by the spontaneous reparative gesture, develops. This is also the capacity that Hollway describes as central to being able to care, and as key to the cultivation of a form of relational autonomy. Both of these formulations represent avenues for thinking through the psychosocial justification for, and implications of, the kind of holding that provisions like UBI might offer. Certainly, the implementation of UBI would loosen the imperatives of waged work and provide increased opportunities to devote more time to 210 J. Kellond caring. It also has the capacity to shift the balance of power in favour of employees, who would no longer be completely beholden to their employers for the means to sustain their own lives. However, I want to explore the capacity for what could be conceptualised as the holding environment of post-work care, or UBI, to produce psychic change in citizens. The previous chapter explored how the inequalities characteristic of neoliberal capitalism affect the development of capacities, and I emphasised how contemporary social formations erode and distort capacities that are central to psychic resistance and the fending off of compliance—namely the capacities for spontaneity, creativity, care and autonomy. Such an approach is vulnerable to the criticism that it offers no way out because the capacity for resistance is conceived to be so fundamentally eroded by the environments of late capitalism. Winnicott himself draws attention to the potentially catastrophic effects of deprivation and oppression. Thinking freedom in relation to the concepts of health and creativity, he writes that “no one is independent of the environment, and there are environmental conditions which destroy the feeling of freedom even in those who have enjoyed it” (1986b, 232). Though he asserts that “it is probably wrong to think of creativity as something that can be destroyed utterly,” he goes on to discuss the situation of those who are “dominated at home, or spending their lives in concentration camps or under lifelong persecution because of a cruel political régime.” In these situations, he contends, “one feels that it is only a few of the victims who remain creative.” The rest “have lost the characteristic that makes them human, so that they no longer see the world creatively” (1991a, 68). Being able to see the world creatively, a capacity that develops through the experience of intuitive management, means being able to create and recreate the world, to exercise the powers of imagination in order to think up, that is to invent, the phenomena that meet a need. Winnicott suggests that this capacity probably cannot be completely destroyed, but it can be seriously impeded by environmental conditions. This is an idea that evokes Nussbaum’s distinction between the basic capabilities of human existence and the level of capability characteristic of human flourishing, discussed in Chapter 5 (1995). Capitalism does not (necessarily) destroy the human as such, but rather reduces it to a base level of existence that does not constitute flourishing. 7 The Politics of Holding 211 Writing of the relationship between childhood and social reproduction, Susan Ferguson sets out how “the fundamental demands of capital for a renewable supply of labour power exert strong pressures for certain (privatised) forms, (disciplining) practices, and (alienated) states of being to emerge. At the same time, they generate forces that obstruct the likelihood that other (communal, open-ended, integrated) childhoods will develop” (2017, 113). The focus falls here on the reproduction of the worker, rather than the facilitation of healthy, caring forms of subjectivity. However, there are many ways in which the creative capacity might be awoken or maintained: through the experience of holding associated with psychoanalytic psychotherapy, aesthetic experience, or progressive forms of social provision.

Centrally funded permanent job guarantee programs at a living wage, where anybody can obtain a job with benefits, is a very different approach to full employment than a goal of full employment based on demand-management (Tcherneva 2012). Guaranteed jobs based on community driven non-profit-oriented activities that improve people's lives and the environment, provide a way to improve conditions for people, communities, and workers across sectors, and can help stabilize prices (Forstater 2004;Mitchell 2017, 65-68; Tcherneva 2020). Democratic locally driven participation, as opposed to "privatized community" (Champlin 1998) are central (Kolokotronis 2018; Zalewski 2018; Democratizing Work Manifesto 2021).

To better understand how Job Guarantee is not an extension to the logic of the capitalist wage system based on investment, highly relevant are Veblen's theory of human development and insights regarding workmanship [work] (1898, [1904] 2005, [1914] 1964, and 1923). Work is a different concept than commodified labor - a central institution of capitalism. Veblen's "irksomeness of labor" has to do with the conditions and control over work, and not with innate human preference to leisure. Veblen's workmanship [working] is important for human development and psychological well-being. Although, capitalism permeates the whole life process and employs creativity and workmanship for salesmanship and various forms of sabotage. Those important elements of Veblen's theory help to understand better the potential and meaning of Job Guarantee - just one of many desired public undertakings (e.g., around housing and food systems).

The COVID- 19 pandemic has cast the crisis of care into particularly stark relief. Caregivers, both waged and unwaged, have endured the most of underinvestment in public health and public caregiving. Health care workers have been stretched thin responding to waves of infection and have themselves been disproportionately subject to COVID- 19 infection.32 The closure of schools and daycares, meanwhile, has driven millions of women, particularly working- class women and women of color, to drop out of the labor force in order to meet family caregiving needs.33 The pandemic has also served to highlight the importance of a political project that can tackle the crisis of care and the climate crisis at the same time— particularly since climate change itself will drive the emergence of new diseases as wildlife habitation and migration patterns change and intersect with human activities in new ways. Industrial agriculture, too, is a major source of novel pathogens: preventing future pandemics thus requires not only attending to public health but improving animal welfare and making farming more ecologically sustainable.34 More generally, climate change is likely to increase the need for care in response to climate- fueled disasters and deteriorating environmental conditions. Yet while the need for such projects may be clearer than ever, we should not underestimate the political challenges they will face. A Green New Deal that expands access to care would represent a reversal of the trends of the past several decades. As Cedric Johnson points out, what was “exceptional” about the New Deal is that “capital was forced to take responsibility for the costs of social reproduction of labor.”35 But today, after decades of neoliberal decimation of the welfare state, even its relatively mild goals seem radical. Even the moderate welfare state of social democracy instituted by the New Deal was ultimately deemed unaffordable. The decline of living standards in the past few decades is the direct result of increased global competition that has forced corporations to drive down prices and wages. Under these circumstances, forcing capital to pay for the reproduction even of its own workers will be challenging enough; forcing capital to pay for ways of living that do not serve capital directly— for universal public services and ecological care— will be even more difficult. Where will the leverage to command such major concessions come from? The scale of transformation that the Green New Deal represents will require a broader social base than extractive industry workers alone. Workers performing the work of social and ecological reproduction are workers who can form part of the political coalition for the Green New Deal— and they can bring the communities they serve with them. These workers have already begun to organize their workplaces and the broader communities in which they are embedded. Workers in the fields of care and education have been among the most militant in recent years: in 2018 the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported twenty “major work stoppages” involving 485,000 workers, with education, health care, and “social assistance” industries accounting for over 90 percent of workers on strike. The Bureau also reports that “between 2009 and 2018 the educational services and health care and social assistance industries accounted for nearly one half of all major work stoppages.”36 Many of these strikes have also taken on a distinctive form. As Jane McAlevey argues, unions win when they do “whole- worker organizing”— organizing that sees workers as connected to broader communities and that organizes communities alongside them.37 These kinds of organizing are particularly crucial in fields where workers who strike are often charged with harming their students or patients: bosses win when they can pit the public against workers. So using a framework known as “Bargaining for the Common Good,” teachers and nurses have rejected the division between workplace and community, organizing with and alongside students, parents, and community members to win victories around both community and teacher demands (for more, see chapter 14 by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò in this volume). As one Chicago Teachers Union slogan puts it, “Our working conditions are their learning conditions.” Amid the 2018 wave of teachers’ strikes known as #REDforED, teachers in Los Angeles and Arizona brought thousands of community members into the streets to support teachers’ action in the workplace. Workers in these sectors have organized alongside movements pushing for the decommodification of social services and insisting that industries that have long offloaded their environmental costs onto the public finally pay what they owe. In New York City such coalitions have produced free pre- K for all; the Chicago Teacher’s Union fought former mayor Rahm Emanuel’s school closures. In places like West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, meanwhile, teachers have fought to make the fossil fuel industry pay more in taxes to fund schools and teachers’ salaries.38 As Sarah Jaffe writes, teachers in West Virginia echo the struggles of coal miners before them in “demanding that the energy barons who have so much power in the state government as well as in its economy— the governor is a second- generation coal billionaire— pay more to those they have exploited.”39 Organizing beyond the workplace is also important for winning struggles within it; at the same time, the workplace can serve as an anchor for organizing broader political struggles and building working- class power. Such expansive approaches to organizing are essential for addressing climate change: climate change is embedded in the patterns of daily life, and class struggle must be, too. Many of the signal political struggles of the contemporary moment, from Standing Rock to Fight for $15, from Black Lives Matter to RED for ED, have combined critiques of economic and racial inequality with attention to the conditions of life both within and beyond the workplace. The uprisings following the police murder of George Floyd represent the most recent set of struggles around the conditions of life itself— and Black life in particular. Activists have outlined a divest- invest platform that calls for defunding police and funding crucial social services: the 8toAbolition platform, for example, calls for “building up life- sustaining systems that reduce, prevent, and better address harm” by, among other things, investing in “care, not cops.” 40 Such calls are entirely compatible with the vision of a Green New Deal for Care that I have outlined here and suggest the potential for new forms of solidarity. The Green New Deal for Care suggests that we need to change more than our energy sources. The desire for such transformation is already latent in contemporary struggles— in demands for Medicare for All and public childcare, in struggles to improve wages and working conditions for care workers, in calls for “care not cops.” A Green New Deal for Care can help bring these struggles together, demanding a new way of organizing both social and ecological reproduction in service of a future where everyone has what they need to live a healthy and fulfilling life on a habitable planet.

Like the work of social reproduction, the “life support systems” of planet earth— the carbon cycle, water purification, soil fertility, and many other processes often referred to as “ecosystem services”— have often been treated as background conditions against which the formal economy can function. But they are crucial to maintaining a habitable planet and a livable human future on it. Our understanding of the crisis of care, then, should encompass the multispecies relationships necessary for sustaining life on earth. The web of life on which we depend is breaking down: it needs care, repair, and maintenance. We need to support and expand forms of work oriented toward caring for the ecosystems that keep the earth habitable. The New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) is one potential model of a green jobs program focused on care for the earth and reveals both possibilities and challenges. CCC workers performed a wide array of tasks, including forest and soil conservation, the construction of hiking trails and recreational facilities, flood control, and disaster relief. This work, too, was deeply gendered: the CCC was all male, and the work itself— mostly manual labor, often aimed as much at transforming ecosystems as maintaining them— was understood as ruggedly masculine, explicitly intended to make unemployed boys into strapping and independent men. (One slogan declared “The CCC- A Builder of Men.”28) Its militaristic inspiration was reflected in the description of the program as a “corps” and those who participated as “soil soldiers”; workers lived in barracks and obeyed military discipline. Meanwhile, a short- lived women’s CCC, championed by Eleanor Roosevelt and known informally as the “She- She- She,” met with resistance from those who thought women should not work outdoors and was ultimately deemed too expensive to continue. Even the male CCC members, however, were expected to work on the cheap: Franklin Roosevelt told Congress that “more important . . . than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work.” Pay was lower than the standard union wage, garnering criticism from labor leaders; like other New Deal– era jobs programs, it was temporary. A renewed, permanent version of the CCC could create new hiking trails, campgrounds, and nature reserves in rural areas. In places like West Virginia and Wyoming, former coal miners could turn abandoned coal mines into national parks dedicated to labor and environmental history. In cities, CCC workers could support the creation and maintenance of new city parks and community gardens; they could plant trees to combat the effect of concrete “heat islands” and make cities more livable even in the face of rising temperatures. Workers could restore areas that have long been damaged by fossil fuel extraction and subjected to the costs of industrial production, attacking the long legacy of environmental racism. Yet today most conservation work is still done on the cheap, often by young people on service years, as in the California Conservation Corps (motto: “hard work, low pay, miserable conditions, and more!”). National parks currently employ only about 20,000 paid workers while using 315,000 volunteers annually.29 Incarcerated people also frequently serve as a lowcost source of ecological labor: they make up one- third of California’s firefighting force and perform other conservation tasks like clearing brush and fallen trees, maintaining parks, and undertaking reforestation. For these kinds of work to be viable livelihoods, they, too, would have to be better paid and treated as necessary and permanent jobs rather than stopgaps. Another promising sector for ecological care work is agriculture, which is deeply dependent on ecological processes under threat from climate change. But contemporary American agriculture does not take much care for the earth, nor for those who work it. Instead, industrial agriculture aims to produce as much as possible as cheaply as possible, pushing both workers and soil to exhaustion. Integrating care for the earth into the American agricultural system will thus require reckoning with the exploitation of farmworkers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants. The National Agricultural Workers Survey, conducted by the Department of Labor, suggests that nearly 75 percent of farmworkers are immigrants, mostly from Central America; an estimated 49 percent are undocumented.30 Their immigration status renders farmworkers vulnerable to intense exploitation: farmworkers are among the most exploited workers in the country, working brutally long hours for low pay, and are still excluded from many forms of labor protections. Beyond a small number of conservation jobs, ecological care work is not a recognized or paid form of work in the contemporary American economy. Programs for ecological restoration and maintenance will have to be intentionally created and should draw on the insight of Indigenous communities who have long performed the labor of ecological stewardship. As Indigenous scholar Nick Estes argues, “the relationship Indigenous caretakers have with the land, water, air, and nonhuman world is typically not viewed as productive. . . . Like unwaged caregiving work, land defense and water protection are undervalued but necessary for the continuation of life on a planet teetering on collapse.”31

People need jobs, and there is much work to be done to transition our economy away from carbon. The THRIVE Agenda, for example, calls for creating fifteen million new jobs to repair the country’s infrastructure, build clean public transit, replace lead pipes, expand solar and wind power, protect and restore wetlands and forests, and expand clean manufacturing technologies. University of Massachusetts economists estimate that the THRIVE Agenda would create over fifteen million jobs in a range of sectors, including indirect job creation in related industries.22 But given the deterioration in the quality of work, it is not enough just to focus on job creation. Work itself needs to change in many ways, and since the exploration of imaginative reinventions of work is possible through a public workers program in a way that it is not through the private sphere, proponents of the Green New Deal ought to be envisioning both more work and better work. Here are at least four specific ways that should happen. Take Care of One Another The Green New Deal is about environmental sustainability, but it should also be about sustaining human life. Environmental scientist Eli Dueker points out, “This [crisis] isn’t about ‘saving the planet.’ The planet will survive in the end. We need to focus on learning to take care of each other. And if we do that, if we start to prioritize collective care, it will also have positive side- effects for the planet.”23 Green New Deal proposals focus on creating jobs to save the planet and workers’ livelihoods, but we also need jobs to save ourselves from alienation and to take care of another. A Green New Deal should create care jobs. A growing number of commentators, such as Alyssa Battistoni (chapter 4, this volume) and Naomi Klein, are calling to expand our definition of “green jobs” to include the kinds of work that service the whole range of human need: social reproduction, health care, education, and social work.24 We need to take care of the sick and the elderly, counsel those suffering climate depression and trauma, and rebuild our communities. Care work is also an effective way to think about job creation. Some cities and states have begun to pass variations of “green” legislation that focus on construction work. For example, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo pushed a version of his Green New Deal, which would provide $1.5 billion for funding to support large solar, wind, and energy storage projects in the state. This is projected to provide renewable energy for 550,000 homes and create 2,600 short- and long- term jobs.25 New York City, under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, passed a bill that mandates environmental retrofitting of all private sector buildings occupying over 25,000 square feet over the next ten years. This is expected to create over 26,000 jobs.26 This is a good start. But compare these 2,600 construction jobs created by the New York State Green New Deal and the 26,000 in New York City with the job needs in the care sector. There are almost 880,000 jobs in the state’s care sector (including health and education) where the median wage is less than $40,000 annually. And in many of these jobs, even the wage for experienced workers is less than $40,000 annually. At the national level, there are over 11 million workers in low- wage care occupations (see table 5.1). Home health care is the fastest- growing occupation in the country, and according to the National Employment Law Project, almost half of the workers in this occupation rely on public assistance to survive.27 The Green New Deal should have an expansive definition of sustainability and the kinds of jobs needed to deal with climate crisis and human need. We should demand higher wages for personal care workers, home health aides, teacher assistants, and childcare workers. We should also demand investment to greatly increase the number of workers in these occupations. In Search of Fulfilling Work Work should be about serving the collective need, but work should also be fulfilling. Work should be a place to develop human capacity. One of Marx’s main critiques of work under capitalism is that it deforms human beings. He argued that capitalism produces not a rich human being but an impoverished one, that “the more value he creates, the more worthless he becomes; the more his product is shaped, the more misshapen the worker.”28 Workers should have freedom not just from want but from soul crushing, deforming labor. As economist Michael Lebowitz argues, work should be about producing the goods and services we need to survive but also about developing ourselves.29 How do we foster this? Our goal should be to de- commodify work. People should not have to depend on a paycheck to survive. We must find ways so people have more choice over how they spend their time, choice about how to develop their capacity. This won’t be easy, but there are steps we can take to move in that direction. The pandemic lockdown gave a glimmer of an alternative. First, millions of people stepped up, looking to help. Whether it is because they are now unemployed and have more time on their hands or because, as Rebecca Solnit has observed, assisting others gives them joy, we are seeing people all over the world participate in mutual aid networks and solidaristic activities in their communities.30 Of course, others retreated from community and turned on their neighbors, but early studies show an increase in volunteering overall during the pandemic, which is consistent with findings from other times of crisis.31 Second, the lockdown brought to light the enormous creativity and skill set that already exists among us. Bakers, gardeners, computer programmers, lawyers, house cleaners, teachers, and more all stepped up to offer their services to those in need. Others quickly learned new skills: with more time to spare in lockdown, they could pursue interests that seemed impossible only months earlier. People taught one another, and our collective skill set grew. This means some people have a moment to pursue meaningful work— if not for a paycheck, then in the service of our collective human development.32 Instead of a system that deforms us, we are enriched through pursuing our passions. Of course, it isn’t just in a pandemic that people are creative. Scratch the surface in any workplace and you will learn the incredible range of hobbies and skills that workers have off the job. In her recent memoir of her time as a steelworker, Eliese Colette Goldbach wrote, “Many of my coworkers possessed a creative side. . . . There was a man who made stained- glass windows, and there was a woman who made jewelry out of animal bones. Some people built furniture and gazebos for their families, and there was one crane operator who made elaborate sculptures out of recycled silverware.”33 Finally, the pandemic exposed the reality of “essential work”: what we really need to do in society to take care of ourselves. We need food and shelter, health care, education, and social work. This includes service work as well as construction, manufacturing, and transit. And taking care of ourselves includes recreation, music, and arts. We need purpose, and we need space and time to pursue our passions. Many of the workers who serve our basic needs, such as farmworkers, grocery store workers, nurse’s aides, home care workers, delivery workers, and emergency medical technicians are not rewarded by a capitalist labor market, leaving them to rely on charity or public services to make ends meet. In a differently organized society, we could start with making sure these kinds of jobs are adequately staffed and that those who do them are treated justly. And “essential work” is also that which allows us to develop our collective human capacity. All workers are essential, but under capitalism the only real essential work is that which makes a profit. For work to become a way to help one another, to pursue our passions, and to build our communities, it must be decommodified. There are a number of ways to move in this direction. By reducing living expenses, people become less desperate to take any job and are able to afford more choice in work. This could be done through programs including Medicare for All, expanded affordable housing, universal child tax credits, and free or reduced fare public transit. The child tax credit attached to the 2021 American Rescue Plan was a good start, but it only lasted a year, ending December 31, 2021; it should be restored indefinitely. Another proposal is a universal basic income (UBI), which would provide a cash grant to all adults. The UBI concept can be easily co- opted by conservative forces using it to cut social programs and advance individualism. In Finland, the center- right government launched a modified UBI experiment in 2017 on the hopes of getting unemployed people into jobs. That did not work, although participants did report an increase in life satisfaction and mental well- being.34 Critics note that the Finnish experiment was flawed to begin with for a variety of reasons, including the low grant level. The U.S. federal government gave out a number of cash grants as part of the pandemic stimulus packages in 2020 and 2021 but so far has failed to pass any structural reforms that alter the balance of power toward workers, such as the PRO Act or Biden’s Jobs Act. A true UBI, progressive advocates argue, would be given to everyone— not just unemployed people. Rather than a tool to improve work ethic, a properly designed UBI would allow people to choose a job based on what they found interesting or rewarding rather than what they needed to do to survive. One advantage of a UBI is that it is a collective solution to a collective problem as it pools resources and redistributes to all. Reduce and Localize Work A growing number of analysts have been raising alarms about the future of work given developments in technology— particularly artificial intelligence. Take, for example, a recent Brookings Institute report that found 25 percent of jobs will face “high exposure to automation,” and another 36 percent will face medium exposure in coming decades.35 These alarmist projections are misleading in part because, under capitalism, jobs are always under threat of mechanization. Textile workers were fighting new technologies in the 1700s, and we have seen employers attempt to mechanize and replace workers ever since.36 The type of automation and technology takes new forms, but it does not change the underlying power struggle between employers and workers about how new technologies are introduced. Also unhelpful are the ways in which analysts pose technology as a threat to workers. Technology could make work safer and more interesting. We could use it to allow for a shorter workday or workweek, periods off for education, or early retirement. We should use new technologies to bring true flexibility to work schedules (not neoliberal employer- driven “flexibility.”) New technologies might reduce our carbon emissions directly— and indirectly— if it results in fewer hours worked per week and more conscious decisions about what kind of work we do. We can, and must, cut back on the kinds of jobs capitalism requires for profit maximization but harm the environment and do nothing for meeting human needs. We can no longer afford a world in which people drive an hour each way to produce or sell things we don’t need. One way to do that is to abandon the commitment to a forty- hour workweek. Sociologist Leah Vosko argues that the whole concept of the “standard workweek”—five days a week, forty hours of work— never worked well for many workers, particularly women and those with care duties.37 The 9- to- 5 workday is not compatible with school schedules, and for many parents work locations are far from school or daycare locations. In countries with strong unions, retail workers were able to win strong protections on their workday. Shops were open limited hours and closed on Sundays. While this model was good for retail workers, it made it almost impossible for a family with two working parents to get groceries. The system relied on having either a stay- at- home “housewife” or hiring a domestic worker (commodifying more of the household labor). A shorter workweek allows people to do errands without 24/7 commerce. A growing number of countries and companies are experimenting or discussing a four- day workweek, and the Spanish government agreed to launch a small pilot program by providing grants to two hundred companies that agree to implement a four- day, thirty- two- hour workweek for three years.38 The pandemic lockdown also showed us that it might not be necessary for so many people to commute to work each day. Working from home might not be the answer for all kinds of work or all people. (In fact, it can dangerously offload the costs of office upkeep onto employees and extend work hours.) But clearly there is room for more flexibility and creative work arrangements, which could benefit the environment as well as work/life balance. The Green New Deal pushes us to get smarter about not just our commutes but our jobs themselves. As Michael Goodwin writes in his comic on climate economics, “Yes, we need to find greener ways to commute, but we also need to ask where we’re all going every morning.”39 Educate and Train for Liberation Another way to create the conditions so people can develop human capacity has to do with education and training. Some Green New Deal proposals promote vocational training for those people who work in fossil fuel industries to help them train to make the transition to new jobs. And, further, some training is oriented toward bringing underemployed and unemployed communities into renewable energy sectors: giving skills to get jobs. Some versions of the Green New Deal call for free higher education. But here is another tension— a possible danger. In capitalist labor markets, employers use credentials and notions of skill to divide workers. Workers might accept this credentialing and skilling because it is one of the few sources of power they have. “Skilled work” is a socially constructed concept. All work is skilled, but some skills (and credentials) are more scarce than others or take longer to acquire. The skills we pay more for are those that are more necessary for profit making— not necessarily for meeting human need. And often the skilled work we pay more for are in fields where some groups of workers have won enough power to keep other workers out. We want to demand access to training and education, but the goal is not to access credentials in order to find wage labor and survive. Many supposedly progressive platforms focus on increasing opportunities for more people to earn a credential, which is misplaced. The goal is lifelong learning, which would include access to noncredit and nondegree education as well. People should have the chance to learn throughout their lifetime— to have access to education and training that interests them. This is a component of the Latin American concept of buen vivir. According to one of the foundational thinkers, Eduardo Gudynas, “Buen vivir wouldn’t design education programmes as forms of investment in human capital, but rather it would design them so that people become more illustrados [enlightened].” 40 In addition, we cannot treat education and training as a tool for individuals to get ahead. Developing human capacity is actually a collective project. Again from Gudynas: “With buen vivir, the subject of wellbeing is not [about the] individual, but the individual in the social context of their community and in a unique environmental situation.” 41 The goal is harmonious, collective development. This requires us to develop the skills of collective problem- solving, decision- making, and governance.42 We must find spaces to promote training in cooperation: how to work together, make decisions together, function collectively. Education and training must be tools for liberation rather than for exacerbating inequality.

What would a policy response to the pandemic rooted in an ethic of care for people and the planet look like?

Respondent 4: One important aspect of a policy response to the pandemic rooted in an ethic of care for people and the planet is recognising and valuing emotional labour and care work (which are both unpaid and gendered). Very simply put, we need to care about care because our futures depend on it – caring about each other and caring for the planet. Another critical aspect of a policy response rooted in an ethic of care is to ensure that the policy response is both diverse and inclusive of marginalised communities, as well as informed by an intersectional feminist perspective. These two, together, are important because it is not simply about adding more women or people of colour, then stirring; it is about increasing diversity from within whilst also integrating an intersectional perspective.

Respondent 5: An intersectional gender analysis can help ensure, for example, that the Green New Deal’s emphasis on shifting to renewable energy and creating new jobs simultaneously addresses the following questions: What are the programmes and policies that will create those jobs? Who sits in those power structures right now? Who’s going to be affected by those shifts? How are they intersectionally gendered? What are the divisions across socioeconomic classes that will affect the distribution of benefits from a Green New Deal? Across race? If those questions are not integrated into our policy solutions, what it means is we have the potential of reproducing the same inequalities that we have in our energy systems right now, not just from the perspective of who has the jobs, but who owns the energy that we produce. It is the same in policies around transportation, and agriculture, and everything else; we must always understand the gendered impacts of who has power and access and voice. It is critical to developing the policy … But beyond that, it’s because we know that if you don’t include multiple views and multiple understandings of what communities are facing, it’s like trying to read a book where every other word is missing. You’re just having a totally incomplete story. And so, things need to be community based and they need to be based on the experiences of what people do in their everyday life. It is easy to envision policies being created that don’t centre the question of, for example, what does caregiving look like? What does this mean from the perspective of teachers, of health-care workers, of people who are in the business of food creation. A lot of this just comes down to ensuring that the design of policies equitably reflect the needs of communities.

Respondent 1: We know that COVID-19 is having a disproportionate impact on women – 70 per cent of health-care workers worldwide are women. They are on the frontlines during this public health pandemic, providing care while also putting their own health at risk. We have also seen how mothers are bearing a greater burden for caregiving with school closures and there has been a drastic rise in gender-based, domestic violence as people have been sheltering in place. These aren’t one-time incidents: when climate disasters hit, we see many of the same statistics. Crises exacerbate gender-based violence and inequity, and this must be addressed in any just recovery or just transition policies.