Universal basic income (Special report, last week) sounds very good. Indeed, with growing automation in the workplace, measures are needed to prevent the job market from imploding. However, I would like to tell you about a surreal conversation I had recently with some friends.
We were discussing UBI and I asked my friends what productive things they would do with the increased freedom it would give them.
One said that he would use the time to restore classic cars and another expressed an interest in knitting and clothing design.
For me, this is proof of the madness of modern society: we have invested massive effort in creating mechanisms to eliminate work, but have somehow thrown the baby out with the bath-water.
This was confirmed to me by these two friends, who expressed interest in taking on (as a hobby) exactly those tasks which we have (in the real economy) “given away” to machines.
So why bother automating? Why not simply keep a wide range of tasks relatively manual, so that a good number of people have stimulating, productive occupations and the self-respect that goes with that?
However, there is one further, much darker, argument against UBI: how can we in the west award ourselves such payments when the shirts on our backs and the phones in our pockets have been produced by exploited workers in China and in Bangladesh?
These workers have no access to privileges such as UBI. Implementing UBI with such unbalanced terms of trade is simply decadence on our part.
Alan Mitcham
Cologne, Germany
Reading your report on universal basic income made me think back to when I started work at 16 in the engineering industry in 1970.
The standard working week was 40 hours and when we all signed up to join the union, the steward told us that we would be on a 35-hour week within two years. That was an appealing prospect. When I took voluntary early retirement in 2011, I was working 37 hours a week (albeit in a different industry).
The fact that the 35-hour week was still not achieved came as no surprise as, under capitalism, any productivity gains via automation or otherwise will always be used for the benefit of the employer to gain advantage over the competition. I see no reason for this to change and, given the rightward swing that the world has taken, I envisage the future as having more in common with Mad Max than some vision of a benevolent utopia.
Of course, there are many other factors other than loss of income to consider when removing work from someone’s life.
During the course of a day, most employees interact with many people, both professionally and socially. Once work is removed, loneliness can loom large. The tasks we perform at work can also keep us mentally agile. Once work is not there, laziness can become addictive and other things need to be found to replace these tasks and prevent mental deterioration.
Jim Allen
Sheffield
Sonia Sodha’s excellent piece fears that employers would use UBI as an excuse to breach minimum wage legislation, but she neglects to say that, with its minimum safety net, jobseekers would have greater freedom to “get on their bike”, look elsewhere and “leave it to the market” to dump those employers – reversing the impact of those right-wing mantras which have hit the poor for more than 30 years.
As for abandoning Marx, didn’t he envisage a world where wage slavery was ultimately replaced by people pursuing their own creative energies? If it’s work that turns capital into profit, let’s use the surplus for our own activities. And if it were truly universal, think not only of the savings in its cheaper, simpler administration, but of that great release of human energy. And the growth that would follow.
Steve Gooch
Conaways
East Sussex
