Featured illustration by Mirko Rastić.

Here is a definition of work: “a set of remunerated or unremunerated activities whose results procure goods or services for members of our species.” It is useful for our purposes because it embraces the three kinds of work we will discuss below.

In this definition, not all activities can be classified as work, and work cannot be equated with effort alone. Climbing a mountain to 3,000 meters above sea level is laborious but usually it cannot be categorized as work. The definition does not require that work should be strenuous. Indeed, it includes “autotelic” work, that is, work that has a purpose in and of itself, such as voluntary work. Most kinds of work are not like this, but respond to a need that must be dealt with. The definition also embraces work carried out for pleasurable purposes. The result of the activity does not have to be a material object; it could be a service (paid for or not). Most results of housework, for instance, are not material objects.

Even today, the economic, political and social aspects of work are not always very well understood because, until the 1960s, both in academia and everyday life, what was generally called “work” referred exclusively to that done in the job market. For the purposes of this article, we will divide work into three categories—remunerated work, domestic work and voluntary work—and then ask a question: how would a Basic Income, understood as a guaranteed unconditional cash payment to every member of the population, affect these three kinds of work?

The Job Market and Basic Income

If a Basic Income were to be introduced, we could foresee at least four different effects on the job market: 1) increased bargaining power for workers; 2) more self-employment; 3) more part-time waged work; and 4) salary increases in certain jobs and decreases in others.

First, greater bargaining power for workers would be a big plus. The fact of receiving a guaranteed Income means workers would be less pressured to accept any job under any conditions. When they obtain the “exit option” of leaving the job market they also acquire a much better negotiating (or resistance) position. When you know your subsistence depends almost exclusively on the bosses at the other end of the table, taking negotiations to the verge of rupture is a risky business, as the latter can easily replace you with machinery or other workers from the “reserve army of labor”. This is the usual situation in today’s highly asymmetrical capitalist labor relationship.

With a Basic Income, workers could convincingly refuse to accept undesirable, exploitative jobs and also think about more fulfilling, alternative forms of organizing their working conditions. Unlike Bartleby the Scrivener in Melville’s Wall Street story, they would have the dignity of saying “I would prefer not to”, without dying of hunger. Finally, during strikes, a Basic Income would constitute a guaranteed resistance fund giving workers a much stronger position than they have today, when they can be faced with punitive pay cuts while possessing no other resources to cushion the blow.

Second, a Basic Income would almost certainly encourage self-employment as it would considerably reduce the risks of starting a new venture. For a person embarking on a small business, a Basic Income would be a kind of guaranteed grant that would help to overcome the risk aversion that is often associated with this kind of project. It would also allow for greater innovation and make workers’ and consumers’ cooperatives a much more attractive and viable option.

Third, it is reasonable to assume that the introduction of a Basic Income would favor a choice of part-time jobs over full-time employment. At present, those who might like to work less are still often forced into full-time employment as the alternative simply does not pay enough. Then again, official statistics show that a lot of people working part-time do so because they cannot find full-time work. In other words, people today cannot choose the amount of hours they would like to work. A Basic Income would provide workers with much more choice.

Finally, a Basic Income would mean a guaranteed pay increase in some jobs and, possibly, lower wages in other positions. In concrete terms, it would bring about an upward pressure on wages for people doing disagreeable, unfulfilling work like manual labor or cleaning, while some authors suggest that the average salaries for prestigious or cushy jobs might drop because this type of work would be valued differently.

There is, of course, a general objection that people would not want to do some kinds of work at all if they had a Basic Income. We can come up with at least three answers to this objection. The first is directly related with possible changes in salary scales. Significant pay rises for certain undesirable jobs would make them more appealing for some people, at least in the short term. Second, and more generally, it would not be the end of the world if some jobs in tele-marketing or guarding refugee detention centers disappeared because people found better, more fulfilling things to do. Third, the fact that some kinds of work would simply not be viable at the pay levels demanded would encourage technological innovation and automation.

Here we have to question the notion of the “dignity of work”. There is nothing dignifying about work per se and certainly not a demeaning, badly paid job in wretched conditions. Of course there are gratifying kinds of employment, but they are not the norm. According to Forbes, 70 percent of people hate their jobs or are completely disengaged from them. Following Aristotle, Marx observed that if you are only free to sell your labor, you are not truly free but subject to a form of servitude. What gives dignity is having your material existence guaranteed. In this sense, supporting a Basic Income is perfectly compatible with (even complementary to) defending access to paid work for anyone who wants it. Indeed, proponents of a Basic Income have convincingly described how a Basic Income would make this goal more attainable.

The tremendously damaging changes in the job market resulting from the austerity policies and structural adjustments that were first imposed with the early symptoms of the global financial crisis are all too visible today. Some pundits, winding the clock back to the years before World War II, offer full employment as a “solution” to the crisis of work. But there are several urgent, interrelated realities that make a Basic Income a more reasonable priority: the burgeoning phenomenon of the working poor; the extremely precarious circumstances of much of the working class; the strong likelihood of further automation causing more unemployment without the compensation of newly created jobs; and huge changes in working relationships (or lack thereof).

It has been estimated that by 2033 almost half of today’s jobs will be automated. Many people working in the artificial intelligence field therefore support a Basic Income. One well-known example is data scientist Jeremy Howard, who has said that if we do not want half the world’s population to starve because they cannot add economic value, the best solution is to implement a Universal Basic Income.

Then there is the matter of taxation, which would be used to finance a Basic Income. Information technology is supplanting jobs, but it is also fast accelerating the concentration of wealth. A few decades ago, corporations needed roughly 100,000 employees to create $1 billion in value. In 2014, the value of WhatsApp, with 55 employees, was estimated at $19 billion. What has been referred to as “trickle-down” economics actually constitutes an upward flow of income that eventually stagnates in secret caches and offshore tax havens, thus stymying real wealth creation.

As it turns out, people with small incomes spend their money quickly while the rich hoard theirs. The Institute for Policy Studies has found that every extra dollar paid to low-wage workers adds about $1.21 to the US economy. If this dollar went to a high-wage worker it would add only 39 cents to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In other words, if the $26.7 billion paid in bonuses to Wall Street punters in 2013 had gone to poor workers, GDP would have risen by some $32.3 billion.

If economies are to escape from the stranglehold of neoliberalism, become productive, offer a more just distribution of work, and begin to address the tremendous problems of today’s inequalities, some form of efficient redistribution of wealth is required. Let’s not forget that from the 1950s through to the early 1970s, the top income tax bracket was over 90% (in the UK and US)—and these economies boomed.