Perm do both---UBIs are not mutually exclusive with other structural reforms---it can work in tandem with minimum wage

As is probably clear, I am more sympathetic to the second school of thinking about technology and jobs. While the threat of automation may focus the mind, it seems to me far more likely that advanced technology is harming workers through a thousand smaller, different cuts. Lower communications and monitoring costs make outsourcing, subcontracting, and offshoring easier, severing the legal and social links between firms and their workers. Big data analytics help retailers predict the bare minimum their suppliers will accept for goods, driving down profits and workers’ wages. The network effects in two-sided market platforms give firms such as Uber enormous power to drive down compensation for drivers or to terminate them without due process. Background checks can uncover minor criminal histories or financial difficulties that eliminate applicants from consideration. Algorithmic scheduling leaves baristas and fast food workers without predictable hours. And all this plays out against the backdrop of globalized trade and investment, financialization, and the erosion of the welfare state, all of which shift market risks to workers.

The result is that those with jobs are increasingly divided into haves and have-nots. The haves include those in the professions along with a small number of well-compensated managers at leading firms who develop production strategies. The have-nots comprise a growing number of freelance knowledge workers hired on a project-by-project basis and an enormous number of less skilled service workers. The have-nots are losing out along multiple axes: they lack decent compensation and reasonable hours; their work is precarious; and they have no formal representation in the workplace or the economy. Needless to say, women, people of color, non-citizens, and the poor suffer the most. Panic over automation just makes matters worse, allowing brick-and-mortar firms to resist worker demands for higher wages or paid sick leave: if workers start to ask for too much, the market reasoning goes, robots will look more and more attractive. The future of work is already here, in other words, and it looks grim.

If this is right, a UBI would be a godsend even if unemployment falls. By placing a floor below earnings, it would alleviate dire poverty and protect workers against the existential risks that accompany job losses today. It would also make it easier to move between jobs, relocate for work, or take time out of the workforce for training, education, caregiving, or just a salubrious break. Perhaps most important, it would sever the link between work and welfare, enabling all to obtain basic resources without the shame of an adversarial application process. And as Stern argues, if workers have a guaranteed minimal income, they’ll be better able to stand up for themselves at work—and in voting booths and civil society.

But a standalone UBI can only do so much for workers, as Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols elucidate in their contribution to this debate, People Get Ready: the Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Economy (2016). McChesney and Nichols survey the same landscape that Stern and Ford do, but they argue that the challenge we face runs much deeper than automation.

Their target is three decades of deregulated markets, which have created an oligopolistic political economy. Thanks to the weakening of antitrust enforcement and the explosive growth of tech companies with characteristics of natural monopolies, a handful of firms now dominate many industrial sectors: Walmart, Target, and major grocers in retail; Apple, Google, and Facebook in consumer tech; Amazon, Uber, FedEx, DHL, and UPS in logistics; fast food brands and restaurant chains in food service. That the finance sector sits atop this pyramid should by now be a matter of judicial notice. Without powerful unions or the support of the state, workers can’t hope to counteract such firms in either the economic or the political sphere.

In my view, our current path of technological development will only make matters worse. For one thing, robots themselves will become an important capital investment. As Ford notes, Uber’s move toward autonomous cars may heavily centralize car ownership, since many consumers will no longer feel a need to have an automobile. But Ford doesn’t follow that argument to its conclusion: that if one company controls urban transportation, that company may become politically untouchable. What’s more, Uber’s power pales in comparison to that of some other Silicon Valley firms. At a recent conference I argued that Google could soon become a state-within-the-state. Several technology policy experts laughed—not because they thought I was being dramatic, but because they felt we crossed that Rubicon some time ago. The massive investments in data-gathering and processing necessary for advanced machine learning make it the provenance of a handful of firms, who will then control who can use their AIs, and how.

McChesney and Nichols therefore propose broad structural reforms to create a more egalitarian political economy: rejuvenating antitrust enforcement to break up large firms, treating certain essential companies as public utilities, limiting the activities of financial firms, reforming campaign finance laws, and creating multiple paths through which citizens can build and exert countervailing power, including rejuvenated unions. And they call for nothing less than a basic restructuring of our economy to ensure that everyone enjoys basic goods—food, water, education, health care, child care, transportation, and wifi—by making them the state’s responsibility rather than leaving them to market forces.

We need more of this kind of thinking in the future-of work-debates. A stand-alone UBI looks remarkably tame in comparison—a variation on the traditional tax-and-transfer welfare state rather than a fundamental redistribution of property rights. In fact, McChesney and Nichols dismiss a UBI as little more than a means to bolster consumerism. If we’re going to have a major fight over work and welfare, they say, we should “fight for a world where [our] concerns are central, and not struggle to be extras in a world of, by, and for the rich.” That’s absolutely correct, but it shouldn’t rule out a UBI, which could be layered atop a liberal economy or a social democratic economy. Nothing in the policy precludes a more fundamental rethinking of social and political relations. Still, McChesney and Nichols are right to highlight some very problematic aspects of mainstream UBI support.

Many UBI proponents embrace market ordering and consumer welfare to the detriment of democracy and social equality. Historical support for the policy among neoliberal giants Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman is a frequent reference point, including by Stern, and leading advocates have often suggested that a UBI would enable labor market deregulation. While Stern endorses minimum wage hikes and enhanced collective bargaining rights in the short term, he echoes deregulatory logic in places, at one point stating that a UBI would make “a minimum wage less necessary.” The underlying argument is now canonical within welfare economics and legal scholarship: taxation is a more effective means of redistribution than regulation is, and it doesn’t contract markets the way regulations can. Policymakers can therefore ensure both efficiency and equity through market ordering and transfers.

But that argument has glaring flaws. Applied to minimum wage laws, it disregards the emerging consensus among leading economists that raising the wage within historical limits will not reduce work opportunities. It also disregards the close relationship between economic power, political power, and social power that McChesney and Nichols highlight. And in some cases it just plain misses the point. As I’ve argued elsewhere, minimum wages do far more than just alleviate poverty. They help undermine status hierarchies and relationships of domination in the workplace, bolster the state’s legitimacy with workers, encourage norms of shared sacrifice, and deter certain very punishing forms of work. Such laws will be even more important if a UBI is limited to citizens; otherwise non-citizens will perform all menial work for meager wages, as citizens ascend to a sort of rentier class.