Many basic income advocates argue that a basic income could also redistribute reproductive and care tasks within society. Do you see that potential as well?

Feminist circles have been debating the question of recognition in care work for a long time. Some, like the Wages for Housework campaigns of the 1970s, argued that care work needs to be recognised by being paid for via a wage. The idea was that, under capitalism, you recognise activities by paying people to do them. So when we pay people who are doing housework, that's a form of recognition.

I would rather use basic income as a stepping stone in a different direction. Instead of commodifying care and paying people to do it, let's decommodify all important activity and recognise that a lot of things are done not for a wage, but for other reasons. Let’s find ways of recognising, valuing and rewarding work (caring or otherwise) beyond the wage.

There are plenty of feminists who say, hang on a second – basic income will potentially have the opposite effect of entrenching gendered relations of care.

The counter-argument goes more or less like this: if we give everyone a basic income, you are indeed supporting women who choose to do care in the home rather than to enter the formal wage labour markets. But, in enabling them to do this, you are perpetuating the gendered division of labour in which women are culturally and socially encouraged to stay in the home and men are encouraged to go out into the work force. And because of patriarchy, men generally earn more than women, so that would add an economic reason for women who are in families with men to be the ones to give up their (smaller) wage and choose to do the unpaid care-work. While I agree that this could be a potential problem (though I’d be interested to see what actually happens), I don’t think this is a reason not to have a basic income. UBI just has too many other important benefits, including for women. But this is another reason why I think basic income needs to be paired with a broader conversation around the nature of work.

For me, a lot of that also boils down to a conversation around working hours. I think that in the 1970s, when labour force participation rates of women went up dramatically in the West, there was a missed feminist moment. I think at that point, we should have said, ‘hold on. All of these women are now in full-time work, but who is actually doing the care work at home? And now that our labour force has more people participating in it, surely we can shorten everyone’s hours and get the same amount done?’

That never happened. Instead, you have everyone in formal work full-time and then…what happens at home? It gets squeezed into the cracks, and typically lands unequally on women. What also happened is that care got more commodified. Women now had to hire, usually, other women to come and do the care work that really should have been done by both men and women, if they had had more time.