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People in the precariat rely very heavily on money wages.
A primary justification for a basic income is social justice.
Growth in village economies is often ignored. It should not be.
The primary value of a basic income would be its emancipatory effect.
If you're healthier, you tend to have a lower demand for health services.
People want to work, but they don't want to necessarily want to do labour.
Workfare will merely accentuate the growth of the low-paying, insecure labour market.
Think how modern economics presents work. Only labour that contributes to growth counts.
Means-tested benefits have one incredible feature in that they impose huge poverty traps.
The Magna Carta was the first class-based charter, enforced on the monarchy by the rising class.
People, in general, want to improve their lives and the lives of their children and other loved ones.
Sanctions and workfare make it easier for employers to impose insecure practices on desperate people.
Many in the precariat know they have to spend considerable time just waiting for opportunities to arise.
The income distribution system constructed in the 20th century has broken down, and it will not come back.
Every progressive movement has been built on the anger, needs, and aspirations of the emerging major class.
Chronic insecurity will not be overcome by minimum wage laws, tax credits, means-tested benefits, or workfare.
Collective action remains the best way of renewing the march towards the great trinity of liberty, equality, and solidarity.
The precariat is the first class in history to be losing acquired rights - cultural, civil, social, economic, and political.
In 1936, John Maynard Keynes predicted the 'euthanasia of the rentier' before the end of the 20th century. It did not happen.
Politicians should reflect on the well-documented fact that fearful, insecure people lose their sense of tolerance and altruism.
The claim that if people had a basic income they would become lazy is prejudiced and has been refuted many times in many places.
Public social services, infrastructural policies, and so on are vital. But a basic income should be part of a package of reforms.
The evidence shows if you give people security, they become better people. They develop their talents. They become better citizens.
Since all political parties blame the others for the economic mess, it is unfair to attribute unemployment to individual behaviour.
Retraining for the precariat is stressful and demoralising; often, they learn new tricks only to find them obsolescent or unwanted.
I don't see basic income as a panacea, but we must have a new income distribution system. The old one has broken down irretrievably.
Many low-income people in the U.S.A. charged with a crime opt to plead guilty to a lesser offence because they cannot afford to go to trial.
Twentieth-century welfare state capitalism was historically unique in that national income was split between wages and profits, labour and capital.
If schooling becomes little more than preparation for the job market and consumption, it cannot produce socially responsible and altruistic citizens.
A rich and diverse commons lowers the cost of living for those who use it. And throughout history, it has been those on low incomes who gain most from the commons.
Capital is taxed much less than labour; subsidies going to capital, the rich, and middle-income earners greatly exceed the benefits going to the precariat and underclass.
We are in an era of chronic insecurity and growing inequalities. In that context, we need to have new mechanisms for income distribution which give people a sense of security.
Nobody should be allowed to fund political parties unless they pay at least 30% tax on all income above the median wage. If that rule applied, the Tory party would be bankrupted overnight.
Most existing national capital funds have been built up from royalties from oil and other minerals. They need not be limited that way. Most are anything but democratic. That could be changed.
What distinguishes a commons is that it is not private property, does not have a price, and is oriented towards 'use value' rather than 'exchange value.' It does not exist to generate profits.
The World Bank and others have been converted to conditional cash transfers (CCT). These provide poor people with cash on condition they send their children to school and for medical treatment.
A multi-tier social protection system must be based on a modest basic income so as to enable the precariat to build lives involving a balance of different types of work, not just labour in jobs.
The precariatised mind is one without anchors, flitting from subject to subject, in the extreme suffering from attention deficit disorder. But it is also nomadic in its dealings with other people.
The precariat can be divided into three further groups - atavists, who look back to a lost past; nostalgics, who look forlornly for a present, a home; and progressives, who look for a lost future.
People in the precariat find themselves in the situation where the level of their education and qualifications is almost always higher than the sort of labour that they're going to be able to obtain.
In the old 20th-century income distribution system, the shares of income going to capital, mainly in profits, and labor, in wages and non-wage benefits, were roughly stable. But that system is no more.
In the interests of competitiveness in a globalizing world economy, governments of all complexions introduced labour-market reforms that promoted flexibility but accentuated the precariat's insecurities.
The Latin root of 'precariousness' is 'to obtain by prayer.' The precariat must ask for favours, for charity, to show obsequiousness, to plead with figures of authority. It is degrading and stigmatizing.
Chronically insecure people easily lose their altruism, tolerance, and respect for non-conformity. If they have no alternative on offer, they can be led to attribute their plight to strangers in their midst.
Think of how much time is spent looking and applying for jobs. Some of those who have read my book on the precariat have told me they have applied for thousands of jobs. This is scarcely leisure; it is work.
The precariat has been losing cultural rights in that those in it feel they cannot and do not belong to any community that gives them secure identity or a sense of solidarity and reciprocity, of mutual support.
If you had a basic income, it would mean that everybody would have a base on top of which their earned income would be taxed at the standard rate of tax. That would increase the incentive to take low-wage jobs.
Politicians seem desperate to appeal to their respective versions of the so called 'middle class,' unable to empathise with the precariat and eager to dream up fresh and tougher sanctions against society's wounded.
What we need is a slow time movement to gain control over time and an overhaul of work statistics to give a better perspective on all the work being done and how much of it is undesirable, unnecessary, and demeaning.
Globalisation, technological change, and the move to flexible labour markets has channelled more and more income to rentiers - those owning financial, physical, or so-called intellectual property - while real wages stagnate.