Universal basic income as a strategy for decent work

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A chapter co-written by SUPSI Professor Nicolas Pons Vignon was included in a recent publication by Edward Elgar Publishing on the topic of decent work and sustainable development goals.

The Elgar Companion to Decent Work and the Sustainable Development Goals, edited by Edward Elgar Publishing, was recently published, which includes the chapter ‘Size matters: universal basic income as a strategy for decent work’, written by Nicolas Pons-Vignon and Ruth Castel-Branco.

The book is an essential referencefor understanding the role of the International LabourOrganization (ILO) and its promotion of fair conditions,rights at work and employment opportunities for all.

Edited by Madelaine Moore, Postdoctoral Researcher, Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Germany and Lecturer, University of New South Wales, Australia; Christoph Scherrer, Professor Emeritus of Globalization and Politics, University of Kassel and Associate Fellow, Global Labour University, Germany and Marcel van der Linden, Senior Research Fellow, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Pons-Vignon and Castel-Branco's chapter analyzes the promises and pitfalls of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a strategy for promoting decent work
After an overview of the historical evolution of the concept, the authors discuss different rationales for a UBI, along with its limitations. These motivations range from radical egalitarian proposals, such as recognizing domestic work economically, to more liberal views that see UBI as a means to deregulate the labor market.
A framework for evaluating UBI proposals is then presented, based on two distinct approaches to social provisioning and poverty reduction, which structure the low road versus high road debate regarding the desirable amount of the UBI:

  • Residual approach: views poverty as an anomaly in an otherwise functional market system. The goal is to provide tools (such as training or access to credit) to help people integrate into the market.
  • Relational approach: sees poverty as the normal (unequal) outcome of capitalist relations of production. The response must then involve mobilisation.

The chapter concludes by reflecting on UBI’s limits and possibilities, positioning it within an agenda for transformative social policies in the 21st century. The future of UBI will depend on the choices of the working class: it could become a tool to improve working conditions or a barrier to progressive demands for social change.

Nicolas Pons-Vignon is Professor of Labour Transformation and Social Innovation at SUPSI. Ruth Castel-Branco is Senior Lecturer at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and coordinates the Future of Work(ers) research group.

References

The book is available in electronic format in the Elgaronline Business Collection.

The title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035300907

ISBN 978 1 0353 0089 1 (cased)
ISBN 978 1 0353 0090 7 (eBook)

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