Could UBI+ help us reimagine community and collective life?
Original image credit - Harnoor dhaliwal
UBI pilots enable us to explore the possible impacts of unconditional cash on our lives. UBI+ goes one step further.
The potential for a UBI to provide people with the security and freedom to say no – to step away from exploitative relations and ‘bullshit jobs’ – creates a different relationship with time. It allows us to re-imagine not just the world of work, but the ways we define ourselves and relate to each other. It makes it possible to reconsider, from the ground up, what constitutes a valuable use of our time.
For me, UBI might mean the possibility of changing jobs, leaving an abusive partner or spending more time doing things I love. For you, it might mean paying off debt or looking after a sick family member. For us as a collective, it could mean a different approach to work, more respect and equity in all areas of our lives, and more time to care for each other and our environment. A basic income could reinforce our sense of the social, reactivating our participation and making us more aware of the inequalities and exploitation that exist around us. It could provoke the development of real changes in individual, relational and community-based ways of organising our lives.
These radical impacts are not inevitable. It is quite possible that, in our increasingly individualised and isolating world, UBI alone would not effect such transformative change. In fact, its individualised approach could actually further entrench intersectional inequalities within a growth paradigm. To avoid this, we need a way of enabling connection and re-evaluation in addition to straightforward cash payments. We need UBI+.
WorkFREE, as the name suggests, has designed a research trial to look at how a community-level, needs-based approach could help support these radical potential impacts of UBI. The WorkFREE pilot is a partnership between the University of Bath, the India Network for Basic Income, IWWAGE and the Montfort Social institute. It’s funded by the European Research Council. Finally underway after delays due to Covid-19, the pilot is a combination of 18 monthly cash payments and 24 months of community-based work. It will end in April 2024.
What’s different about WorkFREE and its model of UBI+?
WorkFREE is a basic income experiment with a difference, designed to explore the notion of freedom and agency in a collective setting while looking at community as well as individual-level impacts.
Compared to other pilots, the main difference is that it combines a UBI with human-centred, needs-focused, participatory community organising. The team hopes the cash will provide people with time to do and be differently, while the organising will create space for that to happen.
The pilot is running across four slum communities in India. Residents are predominantly poor, low caste waste-pickers and domestic workers. They are some of the most insecure, exploited, and marginalised people in the country. Their poverty, insecurity and marginality are emblematic of the structural inequalities and exclusions experienced by hundreds of millions of people around the world.
We believe that working with established communities and focusing on community-led and emergent change will increase the positive benefits of cash beyond individual resilience and the local mitigation of global crises, to the point of enabling a positive rethinking of the ways we collectively meet our needs.
Why focus on needs?
One of WorkFREE’s starting hypotheses is that people are best placed to create community-generated solutions when they operate from a place of hope rather than fear. Conditions of insecurity, indignity and disempowerment create a lens of scarcity and fearfulness, limiting individual and collective power. Hope, in contrast, does the opposite. And whilst a UBI alone may shift the needle somewhat, the psychological and emotional conditions of scarcity and fear may remain even with a UBI. This is why WorkFREE aims to create inclusive, restorative community spaces that foster solidarity and collective action by enabling people to connect differently.
The design of our community work is inspired by Human Scale Development (HSD). Developed by Manfred Max-Neef, an economist and organiser from Chile, HSD is a needs-based approach to developing community power. It’s founded on the premise that while we are motivated by different desires and wants, we all share fundamental needs that must be met to enable us to live. These needs are material but also relational. They depend on the relationships we have with each other and our environment; the ways in which we see ourselves and our purpose; and our understanding of what makes for healthy and happy lives.
Starting from needs enables not just a problem-solving discussion but a vision for how to satisfy universal needs in the future. We hope that the combination of cash payments and community organising will support people to increase their power and capabilities to meet their needs, create conditions for collective change to emerge, and move people from considering what I need, to what we need, to what is needed.
What will WorkFREE tell us about UBI+?
Pilots aim both to find out how a reform might work and to model what such a reform could look like at scale. The hope behind this pilot is that, if successful, it could offer a template for a radical, larger-scale reform in the way social protection is designed and delivered.
Concretely, our research team is looking at a lot of things: how and whether UBI+ promotes freedom in the labour market, reduces exploitation, increases agency and collective action, and whether it might contribute to the green transition. On top of that is a thematic focus on gender and on the concept of dignity.
Will the additional focus on needs and relationality open up political space for communities to reassess and address the inequalities within them? Could UBI+ create opportunities to satisfy human needs in non-material ways, and so remain compatible with planetary boundaries? These are just two of the many questions we’re trying to answer.
Done right, UBI+ could help us to redefine work and care, challenge the inequalities that exist, and move beyond a growth and productivity paradigm to support the green transition.
If the findings of WorkFREE support this, then adding the plus element to any future policy design could multiply the impacts beyond that of the cash alone.
WorkFREE project has received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 805425).
The WorkFREE project runs until 2024.
More about the author
Maria Franchi - Linked In
Following nearly 30 years of working for radical social change in communities and organisations, Maria is a PhD student at the University of Bath working on the WorkFREE project with a feminist focus on the impacts of the UBI+. She is also the Director of ICA:UK, part of an international network of organisations promoting the use of the Technology of Participation tools for facilitation and collaborative, consensus-based working, and a Director of Rhizome Co-operative of facilitators for social change. Maria is based in Bristol UK but is currently living in Hyderabad India.