Universal Basic Income What Do Socialists Say?

The idea of welfare benefits being replaced by a ‘universal basic income’ (UBI) has resurfaced in recent years - a welcome discussion because it raises the fundamental right of everyone to have an income that meets their basic needs. Exact proposals vary but they are all based on the idea of everyone in society receiving an unconditional, taxfree, regular payment, regardless of whether they are working or the composition of their household (see box).

- Judy Beishon

Discussion on UBI is centuries old, but today campaigners point to a new urgency due to the growing precarious nature of employment and the threat to jobs from automation. More and more workers face the insecurity of having no set minimum hours of work or are being paid ‘by the task’. Many who do have full-time contracts are not paid enough for a decent standard of living.

The “possible effects on the labour market of robotics” is one of the motivations behind a report advocating UBI that is being presented to the European parliament in February by a Luxembourg MEP. The French Parti Socialiste (PS) presidential candidate, Benoit Hamon, chosen by the party’s membership for rejecting the anti-working class measures of present PS president Hollande, calls for an eventual UBI of €750 a month for every adult in France. He aims to partly finance it by a tax on the deployment of robots.

Limited UBI-type trials are being carried out - or are planned - in a number of countries and cities around the world, including in Finland, the Netherlands and Kenya. In Britain, the Scottish National Party and Green Party support the idea of a UBI, and Jeremy Corbyn has said Labour will look into it.

Right-wing motivations too

Ominously, it is not only from the left that support for UBI comes. The UBI trial in Finland, involving unemployed workers, is under a right-wing coalition government. Among right wing capitalist economists and commentators who have supported some form of UBI (including ‘negative income tax’) are Milton Friedman and Charles Murray in the US, who argue it would reduce government bureaucracy by axing welfare programmes and open up a bigger ‘free market’ for private service provision.