Universalizing Transition Rights through Guaranteed Income
by C L'HirondelleLink to article
On one typical cold and rainy West Coast winter evening ten years ago, I stood with a small group of mostly union activists handing out leaflets to lined-up moviegoers, urging them to boycott the theatre in solidarity with locked-out union projectionists. I had never been a union member, but was there, as I had also been at many other union rallies, because of believing in the principle of solidarity. Having found myself a single mother on welfare, then having joined an anti-poverty group, having started a welfare rights group which led to a short-lived Union of Marginalized and Unemployed Workers, was the reason I was out in foul weather trying to convince people not to go to a movie. One woman I handed a leaflet to engaged me in a conversation that ended with her telling me I was a dupe of the unions—”they wouldn’t do the same for you as a single mother.”
Over the course of the next five years I saw this sad fact demonstrated. Our anti-poverty actions were almost unanimously ignored by labor unions. Our Union of Marginalized and Unemployed Workers folded both from lack of funds and from a decision to change our name after a racked-with-rage speech by a man traumatized by poverty and disability: “it is a union worker who will cut me off welfare, it is a union bus driver who will kick me off the bus when I don’t have enough fare, it is a union ambulance driver who doesn’t want to help me because he thinks I am a drug addict.”
In spite of all this, I still believe in the principle of solidarity even though it is rarely practiced. I believe in it because there is a way to manifest actual, as opposed to theoretical, solidarity: implement a universal Guaranteed Livable Income in every country in the world.
This may sound implausible, however, this very old idea—also known as Guaranteed Annual Income by people such as Martin Luther King Jr., a National Dividend by Thomas Paine, and ‘Basic Income Guarantee’ by many current international groups—is again on the horizon. People can simply choose solidarity enacted with a Guaranteed Livable Income, or humanity will continue to choose by default a world dominated by perpetual conflict and competition.
This Conflict/Compete ethic will encroach further and further into every facet of human-to-human interaction, as well as poisoning, literally, human-to-nature interactions thus creating a tragicomic war against ourselves—since, after all, our life and health depend on the life and health of our natural environment.
One sign that a universal income benefit is on the horizon is the recent call from United Professionals for “Transition Rights” which parallels labor unions’ “Just Transition Fund” [1].
According to the UP article, Transition Rights are about “freedom to explore what [job] you want to do next, without financial devastation.” The principle of the “Just Transition Fund” is to ensure that workers who lose their jobs due to environmental policies are not forced to commit “economic suicide.” [2]
A Guaranteed Livable Income would universalize ‘Transition Fund’ principles to extend them to all people–especially those excluded from formal work [3].
Hand wringing about where the money would come from for a guaranteed income (since money is a human invention), or worrying “what if people won’t work,” are only worn-out excuses (going all the way back to Malthus!) that allow billions of people to live with the lethal pendulum of income insecurity dangling daily over their heads – depleting their health and needlessly shortening their lives. [4]
So … It should be simple and obvious for humanity to choose between the pathetic (because it is avoidable) nightmare of forcing everyone, including children, to compete for jobs and income, or the achievable goal of universal income security. [5]
References:
[1] Just Transition Fund
UK Trades Union Congress sponsored document “Green and Fair Future” documents the history of Just Transition and calls for a JTF in order to make sure that “all the conditions exist for a genuinely just transition to a low carbon economy” http://www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-14922-f0.cfm
Canadian Labour Congress 2008 convention: “In creating the legislative framework for investments and expenditures to deal with climate change, the Federal government should establish Just Transition Funds.” http://www.labourcouncil.ca/CLCgreen.pdf
[2] Tony Mazzocchi: “Workers Must Be Compensated Fully If Jobs Are Lost for Environmental Reasons — We Call This ‘A Just Transition’”, 2000, http://www.kclabor.org/mazzgreen.htm
Mazzocchi who coined the term “Just Transition” was called the “Rachel Carson of the American workplace” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Mazzocchi
[3] Books documenting the excluded:
“Global Women: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy” by Barbara Ehrenreich (Editor), Arlie Russell Hochschild (Editor)
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=2-9781862075887-1
“Disposable People” by Kevin Bales: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8428001.php
“If Women Counted” by Marilyn Waring:
[4] Inequality and Health: Richard Wilkinson
http://research.nottingham.ac.uk/NewsReviews/newsDisplay.aspx?id=239
[5] Livable Income For Everyone (LIFE): www.livableincome.org
C L’Hirondelle is a freelance worker in Victoria BC, Canada
Tags: basic income guarantee, guaranteed annual income, guaranteed livable income, transition rights
October 1st, 2008 at 4:25 pm
REMEDY: D.E.T.O.X.X. AMERICA
Harold H. Kuester
Horrified at what I believe to be unwholesome economic and political trends in our country, I wrote my novel, REMEDY: D.E.T.O.X.X. AMERICA, because I realized that novels have a far wider audience than scholarly journals or the college classrooms where I spent my professional career teaching philosophy. The novel is a vehicle for consideration of contemporary United States economics and politics, using the culture of an alien planet to highlight what seem to me to be unwholesome conditions in the United States, such as the present economic crises which are causing so much suffering.
The five action-packed days of the book center on the Living Wage Movement and our country‘s growing income disparities. The Movement has organized a bus caravan from Iowa to a huge Labor Day rally in Washington, D.C. The rally’s organizers plan to demonstrate support for raising the national minimum wage to a living wage and for detoxifying our economy and corporate power structures. Through ballot initiatives and legislative action, the LWM has already succeeded in raising the minimum wage in its Iowa hometown and in neighboring towns and states. In doing so, it has had to contend with opposition from corporate power structures, most notably that of Megamart, the country’s retail superpower. Factor in a sabotaged space station, the cutthroat clash of media empires, collapse of our country’s financial institutions, and intrusion of humanoid aliens from the planet Pisces II. Result: the didactic thrust of REMEDY: D.E.T.O.X.X. AMERICA is subordinate to a fast-paced, complex plot which tests the insight and capabilities of all its characters to save Washington and our country.
My passion and hope is that the variety of voices addressing these issues and proposing alternatives might have a significant impact on the future direction of our country. I would like my novel to be one of those voices.
The novel is available online. The publisher is PublishAmerica.
December 17th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
As an American, I am in such a boat. Downsized and in such a boat, I have become a believer in a guaranteed minimum income. Please check out my writings on associatedcontent. I have only one post so far and it is a rather cynical and bitter attack on downsizing. My future posts will be more hopeful and include approaches to fixing problems with poverty and job insecurity(including a guaranteed min income which, I feel, should be set at 15% of median national income)
December 17th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
sorry here is my link
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1290882/downsizing_the_declaration_of_independance.html