From ???@??? Thu Jul 17 10:22:14 1997
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Date: Thu, 17 Jul 1997 09:05:48 +1200
To: .-.-.@ihug.co.nz
From: b.m-.-.@auckland.ac.nz (Bera MacClement)

Subject: [GREENNEWS] article on basic income in canada

for your edification.

pete
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From: Sally Lerner 

To:FUTUREWORK - Moderated
Subject:FW Basic income article




What follows is the paper I presented at the recent (July 5-7/97)
meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics in
Montreal. I thought it might spark some FW discussion.
  Sally

SASE97

Montreal 07/07/97

Sally Lerner, Dept. of Environment and Resource Studies University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON Canada N2L 3G1 lerner@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca

Without detailing the gradual erosion of Canada's commitment to a comprehensive social security system between the mid-1980s and the present, it can be said that the federal government of the period increased the wealth of the rich at the expense of the poor, withdrew support from the national unemployment insurance system and generally created an atmosphere of insecurity and anxiety about the unemployment safety net (McQuaig, 1993). At the same time, the North American private sector was busily re-engineering, downsizing, 'rightsizing' -- creating increasing numbers of unemployed, underemployed and insecurely employed (Rifkin, 1995; Barnet and Cavanagh, 1994; Aronowitz and DiFazio, 1994). As well, over the last few years, the deficit has been presented as Problem Number One for Canada, as overshadowing every other concern except 'global competitiveness' and requiring yet further constraint in social spending.

It is against this backdrop of individual anxiety and downward mobility, incessant media promotion of the urgent need for fiscal restraint and the evils of 'welfare cheats', and an increasing polarization between haves and have-nots that we must view the possibilities for Canadian acceptance of the concept of a guaranteed basic income. Canada's social-security policy path can be characterized as an increasingly conflicted excursion, from earlier (late 1930s-early 1970s) 'European' social democratic attitudes that supported investment in community well-being and the universality that made this politically accceptable toward increasing infatuation with the 'tougher' U.S. stance of the past two decades. The U.S. role model favoured targetted social spending, yet widened the gap between rich and poor while holding down official unemployment figures by proliferating low-wage (below the poverty line) McJobs. In Canada also, the gap between rich and poor has widened, the middle class is losing ground, more jobs are low-paid and precarious, and the unemployment figure hovers at or near 10 per cent of the work force. Since Statistics Canada does not routinely count people who have given up looking for work, it is likely that Canada's real rate of unemployment is closer to 20 per cent.

While there is still strong public resistance in Canada to abandoning the vulnerable and less able in society, there has been an unrelenting effort to 'manufacture consent' (Noam Chomsky's well-understood phrase) for substantial reductions in social security expenditures and for a move packaged as "from passive to active" social support, i.e. switching from welfare for the long-term unemployed to skills training for this group and income supplements for those who do secure employment

Editorials and the business pages press for deficit reduction as a necessity for Canada's financial survival. Media features on "welfare cheats" abound, alternating with politicians' praise of "training, training, training" as the ultimate panacea for unemployment and poverty. Bureaucratic insiders laughingly call this the "field of dreams" solution -- train the people and the jobs will come! There is some suspicion, even among those responsible for designing and implementing the new round of skills training, that the hottest job market to emerge will be for trainers.

Upgrading basic literacy, numeracy and computer skills can be viewed with more favour than specific skills training for jobs that may never materialize, since such upgrading can be put to good use in living and life-long learning. But there are concerns about raising the hopes for employment of those in any training program without some certainty of their subsequently finding or creating secure, adequately-waged jobs. No one can say what those 'good' jobs might be.

Yet there is great reluctance among bureaucrats and politicians to examine scenarios and options for the future other than what we now think of as 'full employment.' Instead, a great deal of attention is being given to 'improving Canadian global competitiveness' through 'technological innovation'and 'increased productivity.' There is some discussion in union circles of a shorter work week, in businesss enclaves of reduced payroll taxes, and among government decision makers of legislated overtime reduction and other ways of creating stronger employment demand. But there is no serious discussion of a North America and a world with too few standard jobs for those who want and need them, and much of what we need and want provided by smart machines.

What Context for Positive Social Change in North America?

For a start, it is important for North Americans to explore new directions for education in the context of accelerating structural changes in the nature of work in North America. We need to develop research, consultation and pilot projects that involve educators, parents and students (including adult students) in designing a new educational system. In general outline, this system would be one that provides not only the basic foundational skills on which all learning depends, but also the broader range of skills, interests and concerns--perhaps most vitally, 'eco-literacy'--which can enable people to play a richer variety of roles in a society that has less need for 'employees' and more for parents, artists, teachers and environmental stewards (Orr, 1992; Lerner, 1993).

Even more to the point, if there are going to be fewer secure, full-time, adequately-waged jobs in the future, justice dictates that we should not continue to penalize and stigmatize people who cannot find such positions. We must examine other mechanisms for allocating work and distributing income. Society's responses to these structural changes, hampered by governments' reluctance to detail actual levels of un- and underemployment, have not been notably effective.

In Canada and the U.S., governments are accustomed to dealing with cyclical recessions and regional economic problems by supplementing or temporarily replacing earned income with various types of government transfer payments. Where employment and wage levels have historically been high, as in California and Ontario, economic self-support is almost universally perceived as the norm and recourse to any but universal transfer payments is seen as deviant and the mark of failure. In areas such as the Maritimes and the Appalachians, where limited employment opportunities have been the norm, government transfer payments are more accepted as a necessity. In all cases where transfer payments are a stigmatized form of income, the economic costs to society as well as the damage to individual mental health and to family functioning are well-understood (Newman, 1993).

Another traditional response to unemployment is training for school dropouts and retraining for people made redundant by layoffs and closings. As noted above, the contemporary puzzle is 'training for what'? While basic educational upgrading for an unemployed person is increasingly recognized as the best investment in a world of rapidly-changing skill needs, the problem of far fewer available jobs, especially for those with a secondary school education or less, still remains. In North America, two intensifying trends have been the movement toward a significant increase in the proportion of new jobs that are temporary and part-time, and the widespread nature of overtime work, including flouting by employers of the laws that regulate the use of scheduled overtime (Slotnick, 1987). While employed people are working longer hours than ever before, it is not clear how many new jobs would be created by reduction of overtime work, and this is a key question. Studies suggest that many employees would be willing to trade increased vacation, sabbatical or retirement periods for less income (Schor, 1991), but others undoubtedly want the increased income from overtime. In attempting to evaluate policy options in this area of reduced work time, a closer look at required and optional overtime in the U.S. and Canada would be instructive.

Job sharing has been discussed for over a decade but has been implemented on only a limited scale. While a shared job provides some income and can partially address workers' child-care needs, this option essentially responds to structural unemployment by sharing the work and cutting the wage. Job sharing was originally conceived as a boon to people who would welcome part-time work. The rise in the number of involuntary part-time workers should not be confused with job sharing between willing participants. On the contrary, increasingly common are families with two wage-earners, neither of whom alone could provide an adequate income but between them sometimes (though not always) can, working at part-time or full-time, low-paying, intermittent jobs. The child-care and youth supervision needs created by this pattern of work have not begun to be adequately addressed by decision-makers.

Evaluations of these proposals for dealing with structural unemployment suggest that shortening the work week by less than 10 hours, or even more would not significantly lessen unemployment. Job sharing is feasible for high-paying positions or if an individual divided time between two or more shared jobs, and early retirement might open up new positions if enough people were psychologically willing and financially able to cut short their paid working years. But neither of these options seems possible to implement on a mass basis in the foreseeable future, nor has serious planning for such change even begun. The wide range of policy proposals and pilot projects that have focussed on reduction of individual work time as one way to address a diminishing supply of traditional paid jobs suggest that what will be required is an innovative mix of shorter work hours, job sharing, and earlier retirement, in conjunction with a basic income program, sabbatical leaves, and perhaps some form of "time-bank" that would allow individuals to accumulate waged time (Gorz, 1985; Reid, 1986).

'Creating' employment by mounting large public or private sector projects is a constant temptation. These projects often involve construction, mining, and similar activities that create jobs at the cost of negative, often massive, environmental impacts. While some projects, such as rebuilding infrastructure, can address real societal needs, initiatives are often undertaken with little or no long-term planning, as when wider highways or costly energy facilities are seen as desirable job-creation schemes, while the employment potential of alternative transportation and energy conservation options is ignored( Renner, 1991). Some projects, like Quebec Hydro's Great Whale power generating scheme or logging old-growth forests on Vancouver Island, B.C., are promoted largely for their job-creating function and can irreversibly affect renewable and non-renewable environmental resources, as well as the options of present dwellers and future generations.

Finally, there are two aspects of work in North America that are in need of redesign if long-term societal needs for productivity, employment sharing and intrinsically-satisfying work are to be met. One is the nature of tasks and decision-making processes in existing workplaces where, typically, people are employed for wages to perform work in the service of organizational goals. The other is the basic control and ownership structure of the organizations in which work takes place.

With regard to the redesign of tasks and decision-making processes, 'worker participation' has traditionally been seen as a key concept for effecting positive change (Kerans, 1988). 'Scientific management' in its less benign versions from Taylorism to electronic surveillance is regarded by thoughtful analysts both in and out of industry as generally counter-productive (Braverman, 1974). There has long been evidence that "jobs which offer variety and require the individual to exercise discretion over his work activities lead to enhanced well-being and mental health" (Warr and Wall, 1975). If this is the case -- and few healthy employees would argue that it is not -- then decision processes about job design and technological innovation must be opened to the workers involved, both on moral grounds and because it is very likely that greater productivity and better quality result from employee participation in decisions relating to their work as well as from productivity bonuses, profit-sharing and employee share-ownership plans.

The issue of employee ownership and/or management relates, of course, to the basic control structure of organizations in which work takes place. Since this touches on what can only be called deep ideology, it will not be discussed in detail here. It is possible, however, that decisions about who is allowed to work and how paid work might be shared among the largest number of people might be perceived differently by workers with effective control over community-based enterprises than by private sector multi-nationals' managers and shareholders. While this question remains largely unaddressed, there are some useful recent compendia of detailed, analytical case studies of alternative work organization such as cooperative and community corporations (Morrison, 1991). Needed now are studies of how technological change might be handled in organizations with different types of worker control over job re-design, and over decisions about job security and long-term planning.

Basic Income: the Necessary Foundation

None of the societal responses discussed above can be considered fully adequate to deal with the problems associated with massive long-term structural unemployment (Ekins, 1986; Robertson, 1989). In order to reduce human suffering, avoid probable unpleasant socio-political consequences, protect the environment and provide a new framework for all people to contribute positively to societal well-being, North American society must sooner or later begin to design innovative, feasible ways to address the basic changes that are occurring in employment patterns. It is imperative now for decision makers to identify alternative approaches to distributing paid employment, goods and services, and to examine both the conditions for their implementation and their probable impacts with respect to the goals of societal and environmental sustainability.

The extent to which many forms of waged work will (and should) be phased out is still extremely controversial. It is very difficult for most people to envision a society where relatively few workers are needed to activate the technologies required to provide needed goods and services. Yet there are increasingly clear signs that such a world is taking shape, and slowly responses are being formulated. One respected analyst (Gorz, 1985), for example, suggests that the "abolition" of traditional work should ideally be tied to a guaranteed "social income". Instead of a dole for the unemployed, subsidization of low wages or charity for the marginalized,.it becomes the right of each citizen to receive - distributed throughout their life - the product of the minimum amount of socially necessary labour which s/he has to provide in a lifetime. This amount is unlikely to exceed 20,000 hours in a lifetime by the end of the century; it would be much less in an egalitarian society opting for a less competitive, more relaxed way of life. Twenty thousand hours per lifetime represents 10 years' full-time work, or 20 years part-time work, or -- a more likely choice -- 40 years of intermittent work, part-time alternating with periods for holidays, or for unpaid autonomous activity, community work, etc.

Interestingly, Gorz argues for the standardization and simplification of socially-necessary job tasks so that this work can be easily traded or shared. If all necessary work required highly skilled workers, this would "rule out the distribution and redistribution of a diminishing amount of work among as many people as possible. And thus it would tend to concentrate jobs and power in the hands of..the labour elite, and to consolidate dualistic social stratification." This is, of course, an audacious, arguably utopian, proposal for a redefinition of work, the details and problems of which are addressed at length by its author, and merit wider discussion and debate.

Under what conditions and in what form might a positive, non-regressive version of the guaranteed basic income be introduced into the existing socio-economic and ideological mainstream in North America? There is no clear answer to this question, particularly in view of the current right-wing turn of events in the U.S. But the question must be addressed, and soon. Whether in the context of social democratic reform of the existing system (e.g. strengthening of the non-profit "third sector"), or of a more radical move toward some version of market socialism (Bardhan and Roemer, 1993; Keane and Owens, 1986) or associative democracy (Hirst, 1994), finding a way to provide the secure means for a decent life to all North Americans must be our societies' top priority.

Most urgently, at the moment, the concept of a basic income needs to be compellingly framed as a near-term necessity and as a rightful dividend for taxpayers' social investment in health, law and order, education, research and development, and infrastructure over many decades -- social investment that has made possible the current technology-based prosperity enjoyed by the private sector (Alperovitz, 1994). The fact that this prosperity will depend less and less on the human labour of those who pay the tax bills requires redress. Guaranteed basic income is that redress.

Financed by taxes such as the 'Tobin tax' on currency speculation or even a very small 'bit tax' on all electronic transactions (Ide & Cordell, 1997), basic income will serve as the foundation upon which to build a richer, more human way of life. While entrepreneurs may still flourish, everyone can share what waged work there is with full income security, free to devote more energy to family concerns, community service, learning and self-development. In time, as people begin to lead more balanced lives, societal values will adjust to recognize the value of these varied activities and accord recognition appropriately for the many kinds of 'good work' that income security permits.

References

G. Alperovitz, 'Distributing our technological inheritance',
Technology Review, October 1994, 32-36

S. Aronowitz and W. DiFazio, The Jobless Future  (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

P.K.Bardhan and J.E. Roemer (eds.) Market Socialism: The Current
Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)

R. J. Barnet and J. Cavanagh, Global Dreams  (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1994).

H. Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capitalism (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1974.

P. Ekins,The Living Economy   (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1986)

A. Gorz, Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work  (London:
Pluto Press, 1985).

P. Hirst, Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social
Governance (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1994)

R. Ide and A, Cordell, The New Wealth of Nations (Toronto: Between
the Lines Press, 1997)

J. Keane and J. Owens, After Full Employment  (London: Hutchinson,
1986. Ch. 9 - Beyond the employment society)

P. Kerans, Welfare and Worker Participation: Eight Case Studies (New
York:St. Martin's Press, 1988)

B. Kitchen, A Guaranteed Income: A New Look at an Old Idea
(Toronto: The Social planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, 1986)

S. Lerner, editor, Environmental Stewardship: Studies in Active
Earthkeeping (Waterloo, Ontario: University of Waterloo, Geography
Department Publication Series, 1993)

S. Lerner, The future of work in North America: good jobs, bad jobs,
beyond jobs", Futures, March 1994, 26/2, pages 185-196

L. McQuaig, The Wealthy Banker's Wife : the assault on equality in
Canada (Toronto : Penguin Books, 1993)

R. Morrison,We Build the Road as We Travel: Mondragon, a Cooperative
Social System (Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1991);

K. S. Newman, Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American
Dream (New York: Basic Books, 1993)

C. Offe, 'Full employment:asking the wrong question?', Dissent,
Winter 1995, pages 77-81

D.W. Orr, Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to the
Postmodern World  (Albany, NY:State University of New York Press,
1992)

F. Reid, 'Combating unemployment through work time reductions',
Canadian Public Policy, 1986, 12/2, pages 275-285

M. Renner, Jobs in a Sustainable Economy  - Worldwatch Paper 104
(Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute, 1991)

J. Rifkin, The End of Work  (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1995).

J. Robertson, Future Wealth: a New Economics for the 21st Century
(London: Cassell Publishers Ltd., 1989)

J. B. Schor, The Overworked American: the Unexpected Decline of
Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1991); Slotnick, ibid; Reid, op cit,
note

L. Slotnick, 'Rules to curb overtime are widely flouted, Ontario
Report Finds', Toronto Globe and Mail ,  June 25, 1987.

P. Van Parijs, Arguing for Basic Income: Ethical Foundations for a
Radical Reform  (London: Verso Press, 1992)

P. Warr and T. Wall, Work and Well-Being  (Hammondsworth, Middlesex,
England: Penguin, 1975)

M. Wolfson, 'A guaranteed income', Policy Options , January 1986:36.
A. Yalnizyan, Shifting Time  (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 1994) 

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©Sally Lerner

Dept. of Environment and Resource Studies, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON CANADA N2L3G1

supplied to GREENNEWS by: Peter Davis, Department of Geography,    University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019   Auckland NZ 

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Date: Thu, 17 Jul 1997 10:07:34 +1200

Subject: [GREENNEWS] Re: article on basic income in canada

X-UIDL: 1cd90b40f67df0a91ae233d0dba87d27




Thanks Pete,

An interesting article.

I'd like to address this to all Greens out there...

I believe in the merits of basic income but I would like to see some
debate on its implications.

Consider this: There are 3.5 million people in New Zealand. A basic
income of $8000 per annum would involve the aquisition and transfer by
the Government of $28 billion dollars. The total national income for New
Zealand is $80 billion. Thus a basic income grounded in subsistence
living would involve redistributing about 35% of total national income.

Currently total government expenditure is about half transfers
(benefits  etc) and half expenditure.  My figures are a few years old
but the basics are the same. Thus total Government expenditure excluding
benefits etc is about $18 billion. Assume all other income assistance
besides UBI is scrapped.  Then each year around $46 billion dollars (or
58% of national income) would have to be raised in taxes and spent, or
redistributed through UBI. (Add in an extra 2 or 3 billion for health and
education and you are well over 60% of national income going through
government hands).

58% of national income is not a small number. To achieve this would
involve raising total tax revenue by well over 50%. That will have an
impact on the economy, to put it gently! This may not be a bad thing but
I have yet to see any discussion of the structural adjustment effects of
a UBI on the nation.

There are no ways of raising this much extra revenue which will not
significantly change economic structure. What we need to consider is the
nature of those changes, how they will affect us in a global economy,
and whether we like where we will end up.

One alternative is a much smaller UBI - however this would involve
retaining all the existing income support systems as well.  How would
such a system interact with National Super, for example? Would it
actually achieve anything?

How do you counter the view that such a system undermines self-reliance
- 'turning the entire nation into beneficiaries' etc?

Yours in hope of some discussion

Roland
NZ Greens National Policy Convenor 

©Roland Sapsford

PO Box 11-708, Manners St, Wellington, NEW ZEALAND Tel +64-21-65-1105, +64-4-385-1105(h)

Just because you're saving the world     |   "The most insidious form of ignorance
doesn't mean you can't have a good time! |   is misplaced certainty"  Robert Costanza

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