Turn – a UBI harms workers in poverty. It gives highly paid employees the leverage to increase wages, but this will come at the expense of expendable workers wages.

Third, insofar as a basic income is advanced as part of a strategy for improving labor market options by way of exit, instead of intensified efforts to support collective solidarity and coordinate bargaining between different categories of workers, it could actually worsen the bargaining power of the least advantaged workers. It could do so by driving a wedge in between different workers’ factions, thereby harming collective solidarity in ways that are particularly damaging to vulnerable workers. Let us return to the fact that workers are heterogenous in respect of their skills and employment positions. Consider the implications of introducing a basic income while assuming (realistically) that firms are under constant pressure to keep down labor costs in order to maintain global competitiveness. Workers can plausibly be placed on a continuum both in terms of their opportunities to find alternative employment and in terms of how valuable their retention is to the employer. At any given point in time these two factors often coincide and cluster in the same group of people. This implies that the same workers who are valued by management are also better equipped to find alternative employment. Their exit may thus constitute a real threat to the employer. In response to higher-value workers’ exit threats under a basic income regime, management may decide to improve the employment conditions of these workers as part of a retention strategy for high-value employees, but simultaneously decide to save on labour costs by further reducing pay and working conditions for the precariat.13 Although universally given to all, in this scenario basic income may end up driving a wedge between groups of workers because the exit option at the higher end of the distribution results in worsened conditions for those at the bottom whose right to exit fails to translate into an improved bargaining position.