Illustration by Amanda Wray (support her work on Patreon)

Why the changing nature of work means we need a Universal Basic Income

We have a crisis of work. The secure, well-paid jobs of the past — many of them in manufacturing — are disappearing. What is replacing them is insecurity and uncertainty. Low-paid, part-time, temporary and seasonal work. The “feast or famine” of self-employment. The so-called “sharing economy”, where people rent out their possessions for a pittance. The “gig economy”, where people are paid performance by performance — or piece by piece. “Piecework”, we used to call it. Perhaps we should rediscover this name.

Piecework has been the lot of most humans throughout history. Secure full-time jobs for wages have existed for less than a hundred years. And they were never available to everyone. In the post-war “golden age” of manufacturing to which many would like to return, most men had secure full-time jobs — but women did not. My father left school at 16 and went to work for an insurance company. He stayed with that company for his entire working life, finally retiring at 65. But my mother had a succession of part-time, low-paid jobs. Her educational level was higher than my father’s, but her jobs were menial and insecure, while his was intellectual and secure.




In the “dual labour markets” of Japan and southern European countries, older men have secure, skilled, well-paid jobs for life, while women and younger men have insecure, low-paid, low-skilled jobs. But in America and Britain, where labour markets are deregulated, this distinction is fast disappearing as manufacturing jobs are outsourced to developing countries and routine skilled jobs are automated away. The labour market “reforms” beloved of institutions such as the IMF level the playing field for insecure workers not by making them more secure, but by destroying the security of those in employment.

The scream of outrage from America’s white working/middle class that led to the election of Donald Trump is to a large extent about the disappearance of men’s secure, well-paid jobs and the erosion of comfortable middle-class lifestyles. And the scream is as much from women as men. Even today, despite the advancement of women’s equality, many women depend on their men for financial support, especially when the children are young. They can cope with their own income insecurity if their menfolk have steady wages. Life is very tough for families when neither women nor men have certainty of income.

Many people want to restore the secure waged jobs of the past — to resurrect manufacturing and bring back mining. So, Donald Trump promises to rescue the American coal industry. “I love those people”, he cries. But just as the Luddites were wrong in the nineteenth century, those who want to turn back the clock are wrong now. Holding back technological progress by preserving the jobs and the industries of the past only creates the illusion of security — and it is not sustainable. Just as the prehistoric inhabitants of Doggerland were unable to stem the rising tide that would eventually inundate those lands, forcing the people to leave, so the tide of technology will eventually swamp all barriers.

Robots will indeed take many of our jobs. Mind-numbing, repetitive jobs. We seem to like forcing people into jobs like this rather than allowing them to look for — or create — work that better suits their skills and abilities. But manufacturing no longer needs armies of drone workers on production lines, all doing the same thing day in, day out. Robots can do this far better than humans.

It is economically inefficient for humans to do jobs that could be better done by machines, and it is a shocking waste of human talent. People excel at activities that involve communication, imagination and problem-solving. They add more value to society — though not necessarily in monetary terms — in their spare time than they ever do at work. So bring on the robots, and let the humans go to the pub. That’s where new ideas are generated, new connections made, new enterprises started.

Other industries will be superseded. Renewable energy sources, for example, are fast replacing fossil fuels: Donald Trump’s beloved coal industry is already obsolete, and apart from those who work in that industry, few will regret its passing. Mining is a dangerous, dirty and degrading industry which has killed thousands of people. Why do we want to preserve an industry like this, just because it has historically provided secure jobs for men?

To my mind, the real issue here is not what jobs people do, but how they can have the security they so desperately need. If we are to embrace technological change, we need to take seriously people’s need for a financial “anchor”, a rock, a safe place, an income which will ensure that they can survive regardless of the work they do.

Security of income does not have to come from work. Indeed, as work becomes ever more uncertain and insecure, more and more people will need some other sort of anchor. For the elderly, this is a state pension — yet the right to that is being eroded. For younger people, it is various forms of in-work benefits — yet the right to those, too, is being undermined. We are progressively shredding the safety net that provides people with some protection from instability of income.

No attempt is being made to quantify the cost of the damage to health, well-being and relationships caused by rising insecurity. But those whose relationships break down under financial stress end up in the divorce courts, and for many — particularly women — that means material poverty and a life on benefits. Those whose health is wrecked by overwork end up in doctors’ surgeries or hospitals: many find themselves living on sickness and disability benefits with the support of long-term prescription drugs. And those whose mental health is undermined by constant worry may end up in prison, since chronic underfunding of mental health services means that the prison service has become the backstop for the mentally ill. All of this adds up to increased cost for health and social services, not to mention the prison service, the police and the law courts.





The way to prosperity is to invest — not only in robots, but in humans too. If we invest in robots but leave humans to scrape an uncertain living from increasingly insecure and poorly paid jobs, it would hardly be surprising if humans rebelled against the robots and their owners. But setting up such unhealthy competition would be destructive both of robots and humans. We don’t want robot wars — we want robot colleagues.

I am amazed when people say we cannot afford universal basic income. To my mind, we cannot afford not to have it. The challenge of technology demands a fundamental reordering of society — a new social contract. By explicitly breaking the link between work and survival, we can free up humans to embrace this wonderful opportunity to reinvent work in our own image.
