Work, Domination, and the False Hope of Universal Basic Income
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Work, Domination, and the False Hope of Universal Basic Income Orlando Lazar1 Accepted: 6 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Universal basic income (UBI) is increasingly proposed as a simple answer to the problem of domination at work—one policy whose knock-on effects will transform the balance of power between workers and employers. I argue against such ‘UBIfirst’ approaches. Compared to UBI proposals for other purposes, a UBI sufficient or near-sufficient for minimising domination at work would be especially demanding in two ways. First, the level of the grant would be more demanding compared to UBIs suitable for other purposes, in order for workers to be able to credibly threaten to leave their jobs. Secondly, the maintenance of the grant must also meet strict criteria. The demanding level of the grant must be effectively secured against reduction, allowing workers to plan on its long-term acceptability; and in order to avoid increased state domination it must assume the status of an entitlement rather than a gift that may be withdrawn, through stabilisation against political change or some other means. These difficulties render UBI-first approaches doubtful at best, and an unhelpful distraction from other, more fruitful strategies at worst. Keywords Universal basic income · Work · Domination · Republicanism The workplace, writes Kathi Weeks, exhibits ‘the most immediate, unambiguous, and tangible relations of power that most of us will encounter on a daily basis’ (2011, p. 16). As a result, any political project committed to minimising or eliminating domination should pay very close attention indeed to the organisation of work. One potential solution to the problem of domination in the workplace, now gaining traction in both the academy and the wider political world, is universal basic income, or UBI. Many of its proponents expect it to have genuinely radical, transformative effects on the workplace and on the power dynamics between workers and employers. It is also conceptually very neat—one fairly simple redistributive policy would have knock-on effects that go well beyond the realms of more equally parcelling * Orlando Lazar orlando.lazar‑[email protected] 1
St. Edmund Hall & Balliol College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
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out the social surplus. In the language of self-help books and pop-up adverts everywhere, it can seem like ‘one weird trick’ to address the domination of workers by employers, promising quick and counter-intuitive returns on a comparatively small investment. Approaches like this, because they expect solving the problem of domination at work to require little, if anything, other than fighting for the introduction of such a policy and its predictable consequences, can be called ‘UBI-first’. In this paper I want to argue against such approaches. The benefits of an antidomination UBI would be real, and the effects of an appropriate UBI on the workplace would be transformative. But I argue that a UBI oriented towards solving the problem
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