Stern concludes with his solution for these problems, a Universal Basic Income of about $1000 a month for all Americans over 18, along with supplementary measures like raising the minimum wage and a new Stimulus Package. He also provides suggestions as to how to finance the BI, and how to build a campaign of mass education and lobbying (including the creation of a Basic Income political party).

Besides dealing with the dilemmas that tech change presents, Stern also takes on some of the conventional wisdom about remedial action—in particular the notion that good jobs can be created simply by better education, especially more scientific and technical education. In his Whither the American Dream chapter, Stern looks at both the stats on the projected match between educated workers and available jobs, and some of the grassroots educational initiatives attempting to provide students with the tools to get decent jobs. Neither source gives him any reassurance about future job or income security; quite the contrary.

The book also serves as mini-guide to contingent and precarious labour in the rapidly growing free-agent economy. Although Stern calls attention to how technology and mainstream economic development are affecting those on the margins, he also demonstrates how those margins are expanding and how there are almost no areas of the economy that are not affected negatively by this development. In The Dark Side of the Gig Economy chapter, Stern takes us through his own use of the international Gig Economy to transcribe some of the recorded interviews for his book, spotlighting the situations of the contracted workers he engages. Then he heads to post-Katrina and present-day New Orleans to look at the sad situation of guest workers there who face unbelievable obstacles to both economic survival and basic human rights. He also detours through the dark side of Internet crowdsourcing—exploitative crowd-work that constitutes “an unregulated global labor market where millions of people work for as little as $ 1 an hour or less, without labor protections or benefits.”

Stern’s strength is in providing an overview—with lots of examples—of current and prospective impacts of robotization, automation, artificial intelligence, etc. and how they are affecting, or will be affecting, the nature of work, or at least jobs and the remuneration of work. His argument is all the more effective because he is not knee-jerk anti-technology. He embraces the positive ways technology can be used and developed, and sometimes even seems uncritical or fatalistic about many aspects of technology (more on that below). But he is very strong in conveying the role of currently-deployed technology in reducing the overall number of jobs, at least good and decently-paid jobs. I knew the situation was bad, but many of his stats on automation, present and future, were still eye-opening.

Andy Stern, former head of the US’s largest union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), is apparently ready to embrace a new mindset. His main concern is tech change and its impact on job creation, the nature of new jobs, and economic inequality generally. He quit his job as SEIU chief in 2010 at the peak of his power in order to research solutions that he increasingly felt incapable of attaining via conventional union organizing. The book is the product of this research and networking, and is also, not incidentally, a guide for building a powerful social movement to transform the economy. While, as I will discuss, it has some major gaps in both economic analysis and strategy, it covers enough bases to make it a valuable read for anyone interested in economic change. And if one isn’t put off by Stern’s self-referencing style, it’s also an entertaining well-written read that combines analysis with stories and examples from an interesting collection of workers, corporate managers, organizers, investors, activists, economists, engineers and policy-makers.

Basic Income can help address some of the most fundamental of capitalism’s structural problems of inequality and scarcity, while also providing a platform to unleash truly regenerative economic development. But doing so requires an unprecedented break from the centrality of the labour market as we’ve known it, something that even the most progressive labour leaders are understandably hesitant to do. What success labour has had to date has been based on workplace organization and achieving power in production. While down through history, unions have often had to respond to technological change with new forms of workplace- and industry-wide worker organization, even labour’s legislative and welfare gains have ultimately been based on strength in workplaces and the labour market. Today, however, real solutions require going beyond the labour market altogether to the economy as a whole. Unionism certainly has an important role to play in this, but it requires a very different mindset about structural change on the part of labour activists as well as the traditional organized left.

To growing numbers of activists and analysts, a UBI, or what I will simply call Basic Income (BI), is one of the most powerful tools for social change today, one means of attaining guaranteed economic security for all—which many of us argue is a precondition for real postindustrial development. According to Daniel Raventos (2007), “ Basic Income is an income paid by the state to each full member or accredited resident of a society, regardless of whether he or she wishes to engage in paid employment, or is rich or poor or, in other words, independently of any other sources of income that person might have, and irrespective of cohabitation arrangements in the domestic sphere. ”

It’s still only September, but my candidate so far for Significant Economic Book of the Year is Andy Stern’s Raising the Floor . This isn’t because it’s necessarily the best guide to either the basic problems of our economic system or the potentials of postindustrial development, but because it’s the first major expression that I know of, of an influential US labour leader making a strong case for a fundamental break between work and income through the implementation of a Universal Basic Income. That , IMHO, is significant, even if I don’t think Stern is fully aware of the implications of such a break.