Thinking about the basic income requires rethinking Work
The history of all hitherto existing societies is a history of attempts to do less of it, not more
We all love to hate the private corporations who have been tasked with assessing recipients of government benefits to determine whether they are fit to work, and if they are, recommend that they stop receiving benefits. And trust me, there is plenty to hate about them.
Just this week, a bombshell report found that neither of the two largest companies (Atos and Capita) to whom this Work Capability Assessments have been outsourced, to the tune of over £500m, is doing the job well.
According to the Daily Mirror:
‘Thousands of disability benefit tests have been branded “unacceptable” by the government’s own quality control scheme.’
How does this happen? Alan White outlines the answer to this question in his 2016 book Shadow State: Inside the Secret Companies that Run Britain. At rock-bottom is the profit motive. And it is easy to see how a system that establishes a causal link between profits and how much of the value of the contract they are able to save, could produce such outcomes. In an attempt to increase the sheer volume of assessments done, they often use methods that professionals have found to be inadequate at best. They also use non-professionals or even, at times, computers, for the assessments, in order to cut costs. And, finally, these companies are in tacit collusion with the government who want the numbers of those claiming benefits radically cut, and more people going back into work. This toxic mix of factors produced the outcome found by the bombshell report.
But in many respects that report should not have been a ‘bombshell’ at all.
Their behaviour might have been outrageous and egregious, because they have literally resulted in deaths, but their general attitude toward work, or joblessness, does not veer too far from those of ordinary Brits.
According to a 2011 study:
‘More than half of Britons believe unemployment benefits are too high and that they discourage those out of work finding new jobs.’
The study, by the Centre for Social Research, also found that while 63% of Brits saw child poverty as a problem, they blamed, not inequality, not austerity, but parents who ‘don’t want to work.’ Am sorry to say, but this is just plain nonsense.
The attitude at play here, namely, that those on benefits are hopelessly lazy scroungers, is not a long way from the view that society should do all it can to get them off benefits and into work, no matter how detrimental to them such work could be. And this is precisely what government (in tacit collusion with private firms) is doing through the Work Capability Assessments.
Work is treated as a measure of people’s worth. The lives of those on benefits are worth less than the lives of people who are self-reliant through work. This attitude seems so common-place and so normal that I can’t help imagining many of you reading this wondering what the hell I am going on about.
Clearly, besides being just plain wrong (because I don’t believe most parents would watch their children starve just so they can indulge their own laziness, and also because studies show that 1/3rd of children in poverty live in households where at least one person works), this attitude seems to me to be a product of decades of ahistorical propaganda. Only the poor are required to work ceaselessly in order to ‘deserve’ even a smidgen of dignity. The rich, not so much. And, even when they work ceaselessly, it often seems society is at peace with the poor not earning enough to live on.
If how much you work equaled how well you earned, and therefore how self-reliant you were, I think it is fair to say the most self-reliant people in the world would probably be in Africa or some other country in the global South. I am African. I have lived in two African countries for most of my life, but I have also lived in Europe. Africans, without any doubt, work much harder than people in Europe. This is not because they are naturally more hardworking. A number of factors contribute to it: a dearth of technology which could help make work easier; how much harder one has to work to make a day’s living in many parts of Africa, compared to Europe; etc. But, also, even in the Europe, the wealthiest people are not always the most hardworking.
A recent study found that 3.8 million Brits in work are in poverty. In the meanwhile, a 2016 book, The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does not Pay, by the Guardian columnist Guy standing, argues that the modern economy is one in which much of the profits are in the form of rent, whereby people with capital are able to extract even more capital from their holdings without putting in any work at all.
So, there isn’t quite the link between working and being self-reliant that people think exist. But even if we assumed that such a link existed, that is exactly the wrong way to think of work.
Work, in its current form, is a problem to be solved, not a thing to be celebrated. We are used to interpreting the recent history of the West as the history of capitalist development. But what we do not often realize is that each significant epochal achievement in that history, from the agricultural revolution to the recent technological revolution, has represented a forward leap in people’s ability to produce more of what they need with progressively less effort. To put it differently, the chief achievement of each of these revolutions is that people were enabled by them to produce as much as the previous generation did but with much less effort. It seems people just want to do less of this work.
To be clear, I am neither suggesting that humans don’t naturally want to nibble at tasks out of sheer hyperactivity, nor that they would stop working altogether if given the chance.
Recent basic income pilots have shown that people do not show less of a will to work after they are given an unconditional basic income. They do, however, show more of desire to explore the specific kinds of work that are congenial to their nature and goals. What is clear is that people want to do as little of the tedious, repetitive, soul-crushing and mind-numbing tasks that they currently call work.
If given a chance, people want to explore their creativity.
They want to pursue ideas about how to improve their surroundings and the lives of people in their communities. They want to be artistic as well as test out new techniques for solving perennial problems. People also want to rest properly. People want to have fun (I know it sounds weird to talk about having fun in relation to the poor, but that is the depth of the propaganda). They should not have to forfeit their livelihood to do these. Surely, they are people who will want to do the jobs they do today, but surely people want to be freer to choose which of the currently existing work they subject themselves to.
We need to radically rethink our attitude toward work.
The upshot of this is that society should explore ways to harness the products of the cumulative results of these revolutions, which currently accrue to only a few individuals, to provide for all what they require to survive without conditioning it on their desire to do soul-killing work.
My personal suggestion as to how this may be achieved is through universal basic income. And results coming in from pilots on different continents show that it is a strikingly good way to achieve this.
