Autonomy asked four leading experts in the field about the status and role of work in our society. Their responses touch on some of the most important facets of the question of work today: the gendered division of labour, the potential and actual uses of automation technologies, the changing nature of work practices themselves and more. We have also asked a question regarding basic income – a much discussed concept with a long history – that is central to current debates.

3. Would you support the introduction of a Universal Basic Income? If so, how should it be implemented?

I’m somewhat ambivalent about the UBI, though I’m delighted to see the topic so firmly on the agenda at the moment. As the New Economics Foundation notes in its recent paper on the ‘social commons’, the UBI could prove counter-productive if it were to be seen as an alternative to existing welfare provision and public services. Certainly, we mustn’t see it as the left’s silver bullet, or be lured into viewing it as the grounds for a single-issue approach to eradicating poverty. It is imperative that we continue to address structural oppressions and the broader racial, gender, and class inequalities that currently shape the UK labour market (Tracey Reynolds’ recent blog post for Compass on “Black women, gender equality, and the Universal Basic Income” makes this point very clearly). However, feminists and women’s rights campaigners have long been arguing for the importance of an income independent from wage labour – from Eleanor Rathbone’s work on the family allowance in the UK after World War 1, to Black welfare activists in the US demanding a guaranteed income in the 60s and 70s, to discussions of care labour and the UBI today. It’s clearly important to consider survival beyond paid work (not least given contemporary anxieties about technological unemployment). It just so happens that debates about the UBI are proving central to these discussions right now.

We would do well to steer these discussions towards a version of the UBI that is both leftist and feminist, and which views any guaranteed income as a means rather than an end. Within the sphere of wage labour, the UBI might act as a valuable point of leverage, supporting strike action and making it easier to refuse long hours, low pay, and poor conditions, whilst potentially helping to mitigate the most immediate effects of in-work poverty. In terms of indirectly market-mediated labour (such as unpaid domestic work and care giving), the UBI could be framed as a way of recognizing and remunerating traditionally undervalued and “feminized” forms of work, and as enabling more time for individual and collective flourishing. The UBI has the potential to address issues across the spectrum of work precisely because of its universality, which allows it to circumnavigate many of the intense debates within feminism about which forms of work should be prioritized – waged or unwaged, within or beyond the home.

Indeed, I would argue that one of the major advantages of the UBI is the U. It reduces barriers to access in terms of the need to negotiate potentially complex eligibility criteria and time-consuming applications processes. It could also be a valuable tool for challenging conservative narratives about “welfare dependency”, teasing apart the benefits provided from discourses of distinction, hostility, and stigma. In this sense, the universality of the UBI could be very useful in terms of fostering social solidarity. Again, though, it is important to stress that securing an emancipatory form of a guaranteed income is by no means a given. It requires political struggle (not least around the future of other forms of benefits and public spending, and the balance between services and income). Whilst acknowledging the drawbacks, then, and whilst stressing the need to situate the UBI as a transitional demand within a far wider reaching set of measures, I would conclude that it has a part to play within emerging and ongoing post-work theorizing.

Dr. Helen Hester is Associate Professor of Media and Communication at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, social reproduction, and post-work politics, and she is a member of the international feminist working group Laboria Cuboniks. Her books include Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014), Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018), and After Work: The Politics of Free Time (Verso, 2019, with Nick Srnicek)