My least favorite things about anti- UBI discourse is always the techbros whining that “nobody is going to work anymore! People will just watch Netflix all day!” and I have 2 responses:
1) Who the fuck cares. Who the fuck cares what people do with their time! That’s kind of the fucking point!
2) People aren’t going to stop laboring. Housework (look, it’s right there in the word!) will still need to be done. So will maintenance on our homes and personal spaces. Children will still need carers, as will the elderly and disabled. There are millions of examples of ~work~ that we do all the time, uncompensated, that won’t suddenly stop because we aren’t forced to sell our labor to provide corporation’s profits.
I’m not surprised that what is traditionally women’s work is invisible to these dipshits, but it never fails to anger me.
Anyway. Join the IWW.
Field studies have been conducted in several countries now, and the result is always the same - people will just flop about for a couple of months to recover from the burnout most people who have a job live with, and then they look for something to do. Some get a job with reduced hours, and some start doing charitable stuff like volunteering in soup kitchens and teaching others to do whatever their particular skill is. They socialize more, they are happier, and on average, people will work more, not less.
But the thing is, employers suddenly have to think about how to make their jobs appealing enough for someone to come and do them! It’s hard to find someone to work for you for long hours under horrible conditions, if they can just choose not to; which shows you how voluntary our current system actually is.
The part where people work more on average surprised the heck out of me. Once. By the fifth time or so I started thinking there was maybe a pattern here. You could argue there’s methodological flaws and maybe there are, but since this is happening across all the methodologies and across all the experiments, I think it’s probably real. It’s also pretty straightforward; you find out that it’s people who couldn’t afford to maintain a car, or couldn’t afford daycare for their kids, or couldn’t afford health care, and you fix that and the barrier to them finding employment is gone so they find employment because they want to be doing something.
People would do great with Universal Basic Income, and that’s why big business hates it.
People would be happier. They’d spend more time with their precious people, or relaxing, or getting enough sleep, or doing their hobbies. They’d go back to school, or pursue their passion projects.
What they wouldn’t be doing is working terribly long hours at low pay with no respect just so they can pay their bills. Which scares the crap out of big business, because “people being so desperate for a pittance of cash that they’ll put up with a ton of terrible shit from their employer” is sort of a cornerstone of big business.
So with UBI, people would have to be paid more, starting from minimum wage and going up. The bottom line for doing other stuff for attracting employees would go up too - companies would have to offer better benefits (or just start offering benefits period), be more respectful of their employees. They’d have to insist that the customers treated the employees better, too. All because workers could feasibly go “eh, this sucks too much” and leave, without any serious financial repercussions.
That last paragraph is the thing. Because a lot of crap jobs don’t actually have to suck as much as they do, there’s just no reason for the job-makers to make them not suck. Or even to care when they do.
Employees would not have to be paid “more.” Any amount they get paid is on top of UBI, so you might be able to get rid of minimum wage entirely.
But… you’d have to make the job worth working.
My job? My job pays well right now. And it probably would continue to pay well, because my skills are fairly specialized. But. I would do happily do my job if it paid much, much less–except for the part where I can’t work for much less and keep a roof over my head.
I log out at the end of the day - and switch to my home computer where I do much the same kind of work, for free, for projects of my own. And I also do much the same kind of work as one-shot gigs for small businesses.
How much would you have to pay coders for video games?
Not much… if you don’t have a production schedule. Oh, you want them to work through their weekends for crunch time? Want them to work 8-5 instead of 9-2–so they have to hire someone to pick their kids up from school?
Ah, now you have to offer them real money.
How much do you have to pay someone to stand at a cash register and get berated by customers?
This has nothing to do with whether the job needs special skills. It has to do with “is this worth putting up with if I have enough to cover my basic needs, so I can get the new game console/a better car/vacation next summer?”
…And employers would discover that people will put up with a hell job for long enough to buy the new PS7 or get new tires & a transmission job or plane tickets & hotel fare… and then quit.
(What about unpleasant jobs like garbage collection? Well, you might have to pay a solid amount for that. But aside from that - it’s work that not everyone hates. It’s rough and stinky and somewhat dangerous, but it’s got no emotional stress, and a clear amount of “getting stuff done.” And when you leave at the end of the day, there’s no fretting over tomorrow’s schedule. You could wind up with situations like “therapist takes a 6-month sabbatical and works in garbage collection for 3 of those months” because it’s simple and satisfying.)
The arguments against UBI are not “we can’t afford it” or “people wouldn’t work.” It’s “I’d have to treat my employees with respect.”
Suddenly, high paying jobs aren’t just “jobs that require special skills.” There are still those - doctors and nurses aren’t drop-in jobs - but other high-paying jobs become anything notably dangerous, anything with unpleasant working conditions, and anything with asshole customers.
Not so much asshole bosses, though. Those aren’t high-paying jobs; they’re businesses on the verge of collapse because they can’t get anyone to work for them for more than a couple of weeks.
The only worries I have about UBI are
1. You HAVE to put a cap on the supposed “free market” that determines prices, especially rent and healthcare, because those businesses WOULD take advantage of any UBI to jack up their prices to just above what people on UBI could afford.
But this totally could be done. Businesses wouldn’t like it, they’d argue that the free market is some kind of natural force you can’t control, but… fuck ‘em.
2. While there are at least some willing workers for even the dirtiest jobs, there MIGHT be some jobs that are inherently so unpopular that there’s an insufficient number of people who’d do them willingly (without the threat of death by poverty.)
But I don’t think it’s impossible to fix this. I think even the jobs people currently hate the most could be improved to the point you’d get enough consenting applicants. (It might take government funding, because some of these jobs run on thin profit margins that they only manage to make by screwing everyone over. But honestly, a lot more services should be government-funded!)
