Guaranteed Income and the Case for a Solidarity & Care Economy
During COVID-19, stimulus checks set a national precedent for the government’s capacity to give people money with no strings attached. The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. Nearly three-quarters of households spent their first stimulus check on meeting basic needs: Between December 2020 and April 2021, the number of Americans that reported they don’t have enough food fell by 40%, and those reporting that they couldn’t cover household bills and rent fell by 45%.
This experience added momentum to the movement for guaranteed income programs that would move cash directly into people’s hands. The Economic Security Project documents at least 100 guaranteed income pilots announced nationwide since 2017.
In the Greater Washington region alone, we have the DC Guaranteed Income Coalition fighting for permanent guaranteed income in the city: A pilot to give cash to no- and low-income Black mothers in DC; a pilot to provide hospitality workers who lost their jobs during COVID-19 with monthly payments; the nation’s first emergency cash transfer program for survivors of domestic violence; one of the country’s largest privately-funded cash transfer initiatives to households in neighborhoods east of the Anacostia river; as well as cash transfer pilots in Arlington, Alexandria, Montgomery County, Fairfax County, and Prince George’s County.
The evidence of guaranteed income programs’ effectiveness is as straightforward as it is available. When people have more cash on hand, they use it to take care of their basic needs, freeing up time and attention for other things–from participating in job training to enjoying time with family. Growing support for these programs also shows a continued narrative shift toward the mindset that people deserve money and the agency to determine how to spend that money. As New America reported, “people tend to prioritize the best financial decisions for themselves and their families when given the resources.”
Part of advancing this narrative shift involves examining the places where a guaranteed income movement intersects with radical systems change. Specifically, drawing from Let’s Go DMV’s definition, what can antiracist and anti-capitalist systems change for a solidarity economy look like?
Guaranteed Income and Our Social Contracts
There exists a well-documented “benefits cliff” effect, whereby low-income families who experience an increase in earnings disqualifies them from using the healthcare, food, childcare, and/or housing benefits they rely on to survive. This drop-off in eligibility actually results in a worse position on the net. According to the Arlington Community Foundation, “eligibility for many public benefits is based on the outdated federal poverty level, which was in the 1960s based predominantly on food costs.” This means that, today, it no longer accounts for geographic variation or other costs like housing, childcare, healthcare, and transportation.
The federal poverty line is currently $24,000 for a two-person household. About 105,000 people, or 16% of DC’s total population, live below it. “That’s shameful,” Melody Webb, Executive Director of the Mother’s Outreach Network, previously told Spur Local. “In this nation of such wealth there’s no reason anyone should live below this already meager federal poverty line. The biggest goal is to have us all work together, rise up, and demand city leaders put in place a guaranteed income and fixes to existing safety net programs to provide people with higher incomes without cutting their Medicaid and disability insurance.”
The administrative burden of navigating social services often falls on the individuals and families in need of those services, compounding their stress and establishing a power dynamic that requires people to prove themselves or otherwise earn access to public resources. Detailing these various learning, psychological, and compliance costs, the Center for American Progress gives examples of updated filing requirements, clerical errors, in-person requirements, and more that make it difficult for individuals to know and apply for what they need, further disempowering them. “As elements of program design, administrative burdens are typically sold as measures to weed out ineligible people and prevent fraud.” It is important to recognize that these burdens tend to perpetuate inequity and, as political choices, reflect a perspective of who deserves resources without needing to jump through these hoops.
Currently, DC legislation excludes payments from cash transfer programs when calculating safety net benefits. Long-term, using the principles behind guaranteed income, we can move away from placing undue burden on individuals and families to navigate such administrative and exclusionary hurdles. Instead, delivering resources becomes a social contract we make with and for each other. For example, as the Guaranteed Income Community of Practice wrote in its blueprint report, “pushing for agencies to cut administrative burdens and utilize multi-lingual outreach… can empower more people while also building support and trust in government’s delivery of resources.” Ultimately, we can shift this thinking to “empower people to meet their own needs.”
Guaranteed Income and Our Labor
“Despite all the rhetoric of, ‘what’s good for the corporate sector would trickle down to us all in a way that lifts all boats,’ that empirically has not happened,” Darrick Hamilton, co-author of the New School’s Institute on Race and Political Economy’s proposal for a federal guaranteed income program, told Bloomberg. Transforming how this country thinks about income can “change the way capitalism works forever,” and that is a good thing.
Beginning in the 1970s, income growth for middle- and low-income households slowed sharply despite continued income growth for those higher up on the income ladder. Along with this widening income gap, both corporate concentration and the productivity-pay gap have also grown. The Economic Policy Institute reports that “declining unionization accounts for about a third of the income gap between high and middle-wage earners” and, in 2023, counted 60 million workers who “expressed the desire to join a union this year but could not.”
Covering all this and more, emerging research from the Economic Security Project connects the increase of income through programs like guaranteed income with the ability to strengthen worker organizing. As it stands, “the lack of living wage laws and gaps in the public benefits system… mean workers have to risk losing their incomes and employer-sponsored benefits when engaging in strikes and organizing activity.” Ensuring unconditional cash transfers to workers can increase their wage floors and may thereby increase collective bargaining power. While this remains early research, it signals another promising shift in power towards worker solidarity within our current capitalist economy.
Guaranteed Income and Our Rights
Finally, discussions of labor are remiss without acknowledging the often invisible and unpaid labor of caregiving. Mothers, particularly mothers of color, shoulder a disproportionate burden in childcare and other caregiving responsibilities that lead women to exit the paid workforce more than men. Such employment gaps among women account for 30 percent of the gender pay gap.
Care requires an interconnected set of conditions beyond our basic needs to be met. The term ‘motherwork’, coined by University of Maryland Distinguished University Professor Emerita Patricia Hill Collins, describes the ways in which mothers of color recognize that the needs of their families are connected to the needs of others. Healthy, thriving families do not exist without healthy, thriving communities–and vice versa. (Previously on 730DC, we explored how community safety is directly related to how well the community is resourced.)
Through guaranteed income programs, cash as care introduces a paradigm shift in how we approach health, familial stability, and reproductive justice. “Cash allows for the material means and spare time to take risks and set goals for better life outcomes, something that is predominantly afforded to those with privilege and power.” Increasing access through guaranteed income makes more choices possible. A member of the DC Guaranteed Income Coalition put it succinctly before the DC Council. “This is about food, home, and medical care. It is not asking for the moon. It is basic human rights.”
Conclusion
Guaranteed income is one piece of a larger set of solutions that can address systematic exclusion from our current economic system. Drawing from Darrick Hamilton’s testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives, “We must move “beyond class reductionism” and recognize that race and other social-identity strata, like gender, ethnicity, and nativity, are pillars, alongside political and economic power, in determining our political economy.”
Much is being done at the local level right here in the District to achieve a permanent guaranteed income and ensure that all residents live above the income floor. Part of the latter involves protecting, strengthening, and expanding the public benefits that guaranteed income programs supplement.
“This year, the DC Guaranteed Income Coalition (DCGIC) has expanded our advocacy into several new areas to reflect the multifaceted nature of economic well being, [including] advancing guaranteed income as health equity policy,” said Melody Webb, Executive Director of the Mother’s Outreach Network and convener of the coalition. Part of that is supporting the District Child Tax Credit, which features a gradual phase-out structure that may mitigate the benefits cliff effect for participants and is a proven way to effectively reduce child poverty. Another is expanding advocacy efforts to also address the affordable housing crisis. “Though it has already been well established that guaranteed income has enormous benefits for low-income individuals and families, more research is needed to understand its particular impact on specific populations.” DCGIC is looking at its impact on violent crime, children’s educational outcomes, and families involved in the Child Welfare System.
Mother’s Outreach Network’s (MON) pilot program specifically investigates how poverty is a primary cause of the problems that trigger the involvement of DC’s Child and Family Services Agency. In its first of three years making unconditional direct cash payments to mothers, MON has seen how the additional cash helps mothers obtain healthcare, childcare, employment opportunities. One mother was “able to sign her kids up for an extracurricular activity that she hadn’t been able to afford before,” while another was “able to afford things for both kids rather than one at a time.”
Lend your voice and action today. Help fund more people as part of guaranteed income pilots, advocate for a local and federal guaranteed income program, and ensure continued investment.
Table of Local Programs & Initiatives
This piece was written by Amanda Liaw, who is the Communications Manager at Spur Local (formerly the Catalogue for Philanthropy), a local nonprofit that strengthens and resources 470+ small, community-based organizations doing critical work here in the DMV. Mother’s Outreach Network is one of its nonprofit partners, along with My Sister’s Place, Capital Area Asset Builders, and others involved with local guaranteed income efforts. Visit Spur Local’s website to discover and connect with local nonprofits in the issues you care about.
