A basic income is more effective than minimum wage at empowering workers---facilitates employment

The power of each individual to say yes or no to a job, a power closely related to the notion of real freedom, has been present in the advocacy of basic income from its inception. Thus, in his 1871 Catéchisme Populaire (Populist Catechism), Joseph Charlier described the crucial advantage of the unconditional income for which he advocated: “It is no longer the worker who will have to bow before capital, it is capital, reduced to its true role of collaborating agent, that will have to negotiate with labor on an equal footing.” Rogers agrees that a basic income helps protect the worker, but insists on the need for a powerful regulatory state and thinks it is critical to preserve and enhance arrangements such as minimum wage and collective bargaining rights. One might speculate about the “real-libertarian” legitimacy of various constraints on the labor market when an unconditional income is in place at the highest sustainable level. But as we explain in our book, all real-life basic income proposals are fully consistent with minimum wage legislation and active trade unions. There are, however, a number of trends—such as the shrinking of firm size or the expansion of part-time work and self-employment—that reduce the effectiveness of these traditional ways of correcting the balance of power in capitalist societies, and therefore increase the importance of empowering workers with a wider set of options, outside and inside the labor market, which is what a basic income does.

Beyond some minimal conditions, such as a safe work site, it is very difficult for labor market regulators—whether legislators, bureaucrats, or experts—to distinguish good and bad jobs. There are so many crucial factors that are very hard for them to track: the quality of the relationship between workers and their bosses and colleagues; how much the job enables workers to learn and improve their prospects; whether new technology is used to reduce discretion rather than facilitate work; how convenient the job is in terms of location and schedule; and how close the job is to the great passion of a worker’s life. The workers themselves are best placed to assess these various dimensions and an unconditional basic income gives them the power to give up more easily a lousy job and accept more easily a job that may pay little or irregularly but possesses redeeming features. For this reason, it can be argued that a basic income would not only help accommodate but also encourage the growth of precarious jobs, but not of just any precarious job. A basic income empowers those who possess the relevant information, namely the workers themselves, who tend to know far more than anyone else both about the jobs concerned and about their own situations, capacities, and ambitions.

Being closer to the shop floor than labor market regulators, collective bargaining can, to some extent, achieve the same result. But basic income has the advantage of being more egalitarian. Collective bargaining improves the situation of workers in proportion to the economic value of their skills; to how much they participate in the formal labor market; to how easily their firm lends itself to unionization; and to how much nuisance capacity they possess through strikes or other means. The more “universalist” a labor organization is, and the closer one gets to “social bargaining”—with which I share Rogers’s sympathy—the more this assertion needs to be qualified. The less broad a union is and the more corporatist its ideology, the more strongly it holds. By contrast, a basic income makes the biggest difference to workers most disadvantaged along the various dimensions mentioned.

Of course, the actual monetary value of the basic income matters. But even a basic income that amounts to less than the current level of means-tested social assistance for people living alone would make a significant difference. At that level, the right to conditional benefits over and above the basic income would need to be kept, so as to prevent poor households from becoming worse off. But the secure access to a modest income that can be relied upon even if one gives up a job voluntarily and that can be combined with other income would broaden the options of the worst off and thus increase their power. Such a modest basic income could not eradicate poverty on its own. But it would be more than the “baby step” discussed by Rogers, namely a basic income for parents or a universal child benefit of a sort that already exists in a number of countries. And it would be more reasonable than a bold jump to a basic income of 2,500 Swiss francs, a scheme supported by nearly a quarter of Swiss voters in their June 2016 referendum.

Like the two older forms of social protection—social assistance and social insurance—basic income will only be introduced in sustainable fashion in democratic societies if it manages to get enough support from both the left and the right. In Switzerland only the Green Party recommended voting in favor of basic income in the referendum. In Finland a right-of-center government launched a two-year basic income experiment in January 2017. In France basic income moved center stage because it was the most widely discussed component in the program of Benoit Hamon, the most left-wing candidate in the socialist party’s January 2017 presidential primary. And when the European Parliament examined a resolution stating that “in the light of the possible effects on the labour market of robotics and artificial intelligence a general basic income should be seriously considered,” a strong minority of 286 members (against 328) drawn from a wide variety of parties endorsed it. All of this suggests that basic income now enjoys an unprecedented level of support across the political spectrum. Not enough to guarantee that the balance of democratic power will soon make it reality. But enough to make it reasonable to hope that it will.