The Left has a longstanding preoccupation with unfree labour, and rightly so. The canonical view, expounded by Marx and many since, is that the freedom of workers under capitalism is illusory given that they must sell their labour power to an employer in order to survive. Workers may be free to refuse a particular job, but they can only do so if they have another job lined up or if they are willing to suffer the dire consequences of ‘voluntary’ unemployment.
This fundamental unfreedom is shared by all those who lack the capital to exit employment entirely. In the case of privileged, often high-skilled workers, it is masked by generous employment contracts and wages, ample benefits, stable and supportive working conditions, job-related social insurance entitlements, etc. For the growing ranks of vulnerable and precarious workers this unfreedom manifests itself in having to accept jobs that pay poorly, offer little to no benefits, and come with unhealthy or dangerous working conditions. Once employed, they lack control over how the work is carried out and are subservient to the whims of management. The inability to escape those dead-end jobs for lack of a reasonable alternative, and having very limited power to resist domination in the workplace, is what characterises unfree labour today.
Under a basic income regime, the argument goes, workers gain the ‘power to say no’ to bad work. It is meant to give them the freedom to exit a poor job that is denied them under current arrangements. As such, basic income hopes to improve the fallback position of each individual worker and allows them to credibly threaten to leave a job if negotiations with employers don’t result in improved conditions. Employers anticipating workers may exercise their exit option are expected to offer better conditions, effectively offering workers more freedom in their jobs. The pinnacle of a basic income’s emancipatory potential is reached when it offers workers the freedom to leave the labour market altogether, if that is what they want.
