The need for a Basic Income

The Coronavirus is revealing many problems with existing systems of social security.  Time to switch to a Basic Income?

In Australia the existing unemployment payments system has:

• proven incapable, logistically, of handling the sharp increase in benefits claimants.
• exposed the derisory level of the amounts being offered until then.
• made visible to hundreds of thousands of newly unemployed the onerous conditionalities attached -- waiting periods before first payments received, strict requirements to prove active job seeking -- that don't work in a crisis.

The system is based, as is common in many rich neoliberal economies, on the idea that the unemployed are 'slackers' who will be motivated to find work if they receive too little to survive on.  The crisis has also revealed that the system is designed around an unemployed-employed binary and has little to offer those in irregular, casual, unpaid, self-employed, small business, volunteer, and gig economy work.

In the short term the Australian government has doubled the JobSeeker payments, reduced some conditionalities, and made it easier to apply online.  They have also introduced a JobKeeper programme, at a cost of A$billions, to subsidise companies who keep employees on their formal payroll and pay them (at least in part), even when they have been stood down because there is no work.

But the longer-term lesson is that the existing social systems need serious rethinking.  Calls for a Universal Basic Income system are growing and a petition along these lines, calling for a Liveable Income Guarantee, is gathering steam.  Here's a piece in favour of a UBI which I wrote a few days back.