Separating Survival from Wage Slavery – The Quest for a Universal Basic Income
It is we who plowed the prairies;
built the cities where they trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops;
endless miles of railroad laid.– Solidarity Forever, by Ralph Chaplin
In 1915, Ralph Chaplin wrote his defiant labor anthem in opposition to robber barons who were taking credit for the industrial development of the country. Writing today, he might well have added scientists, engineers, office workers, and freelancers who make their living, and create wealth on the internet.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, hundreds of years of backbreaking toil, workers have worked themselves out of their jobs.
The Pandemic, horrible as it was, became a wake-up call that the wage system is on its last legs.
Until the cybernetic and automation revolution got underway in earnest in the late 1970s, increases in production and profits meant the hiring of more workers. This scientific-technological revolution has been steadily increasing until today when we all live in a world of novelty and wonder. Unfortunately, social advancement has not kept up and so we live in a world of “look but don’t touch,” when it comes to the abundance spread out before us.
Job security and an ever climbing standard of living are no longer part of the "deal".
Advances in technology and automation combined with a rapidly widening income gap have caused massive dislocation, deskilling, unemployment and homelessness.
Job security and an ever climbing standard of living are no longer part of the "deal" for Americans. People of color, already the most disadvantaged in society, are trapped in inner cities that have been most heavily hit by social and technological changes. Life in the inner cities in recent years is suffering negative social transformation brought on by racism and discrimination, the disappearance of industrial jobs with union contracts, the erosion of cities' tax bases and social services, permanent unemployment, a pandemic of drug use, and perhaps worst of all, loss of faith in the future.
Efforts by unions and their allies to oppose downsizing, the sharp division between billionaires and the povery stricken, and the transfer of jobs out of the country, make them seem like modern day Luddites standing in the way of progress - and the inevitable. Those who tried to stop the ratification of NAFTA and most other trade agreements that benefit only the banks, corporations and extremely wealthy, have found themselves run over by a steamroller.
With the notable, although limited, exception of the United Auto Workers contracts with the Big Three U.S. automakers which guarantee 95 percent employment for the term of the agreement, most efforts for job guarantees or to stop runaway shops have been nearly universally unsuccessful. The UAW contracts will likely be a thing of the past as the greenhouse gas auto companies slide into bankruptcy. Capital continues to freely shed workers and roam the earth seeking the highest rate of profit.
One impact on individuals and families is the shift of millions of dollars in wealth from the poor to the rich. While the U.S. has not recently been known for its income equality, the stratification has worsened since the late 1970s, according to the Census Bureau. In terms of income distribution, the U.S. differs little from Mexico, where the top 20 percent receive 54 percent of the income and the bottom 20 percent get 4.3 percent.
Political response has been limited and ineffective.
On a political level, the response, if any, has been limited and ineffective. In the 1990s, President Clinton and his Secretary of Labor Robert Reich meekly proposed retraining and emphasized more education. More recent regimes have not even done that. Presumably, retrained workers would then be prepared to bounce back from unemployment and reenter the cycle once more, although without a union contract and benefits.
Retraining and more education, alone, are not likely to accomplish their purpose if forecasts of an increasingly smaller and smaller workforce are accurate. Movies like Blade Runner and writers, like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, have given chilling fictionalized accounts of what our future will hold if an aggressive wealthy elite continue to control technology and automation for its own benefit while driving most of the population into a racially and class divided redundancy.
Reexamining the alternative: a universal basic income (UBI)
After years of fighting unsuccessfully to reverse the job drain, more and more activists and academics are coming around to the alternative, a universal and guaranteed annual income. There are two different motivations for this reexamination.
A universal basic income is advocated by some as a solution to the problems of welfare, poverty and homelessness. An income allotment would be provided in lieu of welfare and to those who have lost their jobs and cannot find reemployment. These plans invariably require recipients to accept work or retraining.
Others argue that a universal basic income should be a fundamental right provided to everyone without strings. Since everyone - or at least their parents and grandparents - shared in the creation of the wealth of today's society, they should now receive a share or dividend of that wealth.
The playing field for winning a universal basic income changed dramatically on August 19, 2021, at Tesla, Inc.’s AI (Artificial Intelligence) Day, when the world’s richest person, CEO Elon Musk, endorsed the UBI. He also introduced a human replica of a robot that, Musk said, would be developed in the next couple of years to do many jobs that humans don’t want to do, but must, to earn a living.
Musk said, “"Essentially, in the future, physical work will be a choice. This is why I think long term there will need to be a universal basic income."
It would take a massive movement, and perhaps many years, to overcome what Martin Luther King called "fierce opposition" that would be generated against a universal basic income. In order to achieve a decent living standard for all, draconian taxes would have to be applied to the super rich and to large corporations.