Employers also make use of social infrastructures produced through collective efforts over generations, commons reclassified as ‘natural resources’, assets accumulated through slavery and colonialism, and technologies first developed by governments. They appropriate the materials that create and add value to goods and services, including forms of scientific, communicative, technical, and social knowledge. Then, of course, there is prison labour, various forms of unwaged digital labour used to create data and algorithms, as well as old-fashioned wage theft. Neither wages nor taxes come close to compensating for all of this. The fear that there will be free riders who will receive a basic income is laughable given the truly massive levels of free riding on unremunerated labour, stolen property, and privatised commons for which companies are given a free pass.

In addition to all these types of unremunerated value creation, we must also remember that large, arguably enormous, numbers of people are excluded from or marginalised within the wage system because they do not conform to the model of the ideal waged worker. How many of us really possess the full list of capacities needed to devote 40 hours to intensively focused effort over the course of a five-day week? What about those of us with cognitive, emotional, neurological, or physical differences that mean we cannot always, or sometimes ever, work in the ways or for the durations that are expected? How can we be expected to work a lifetime without more than – and this is of course the best-case scenario – a little vacation time and a few sick days? The family is supposed to be our safety net, but for many it’s a last resort rather than a first option. Too many of us have nothing or little in the way of support when our bodies or our minds are rendered disabled by the standard forms of waged work.

A fundamental lesson of the Wages for Housework campaign is that that wage system does not account for all our contributions to economic production and excludes too many of us to function as a credible mechanism of income allocation. The already rather spectacular mis-accounting of productive activity they identified in the 1970s is arguably much more dramatic today, and the exclusions enacted by the wage system possibly even more damning.

Basic income, as a universal and unconditional social wage, offers a more rational and more equitable way to distribute income and reward forms of productivity.

Freedom to choose a family

A second key insight from the Wages for Housework movement regards the way the wage system interacts with the institution of the family to trap many, especially women, into dangerous situations and also benefits from the unwaged labour that takes place under its auspices.

The heteropatriarchal family may function as a haven in a heartless world for some; for others it is a sad and dangerous site. A 2018 UN report, which found that more than half of female homicides around the world were committed by intimate partners or relatives, was released with a headline that named the home as “the most dangerous place for women.” The statistics on domestic violence, including intimate partner violence, together with child and elder abuse are by any metric staggering. Without adequate means to support oneself and one’s dependents it can be difficult and sometimes impossible to leave such a situation.

The family is also where the majority of the labour necessary to reproduce workers on a daily and generational basis takes place. It is an institution that distributes income earned from waged work to others in a household and that allocates domestic tasks to its members along gendered lines. Enormous amount of time, skill, and energy are devoted to childcare, eldercare, the care of the ill, the care of the disabled, self-care, and community care. Without this work whatever you want to delimit as the economic system would not exist, and it is provided disproportionally by women, free of charge, regardless of whether they also work for wages.