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A Citizen’s Income would make workfare and job guarantees unnecessary

‘Workfare’ is the idea that people should work for their benefits. All over Europe the unemployment rate refuses to drop, people without employment experience ever more virulent scapegoating, ‘work tests’ (benefits only being paid when claimants show evidence of looking for work) evolve into ‘work experience’ (claimants only paid their benefits when they work for companies for nothing), and we hear increasing talk of a ‘job guarantee’: jobs created by governments that claimants have to accept. This is the route that the French non-contributory benefit for unemployed people has taken, i and the UK’s system is passing through similar stages.

The problem is that the employment market functions most efficiently when it is a genuine market: that is, when it is not interfered with, and supply and demand balance one another through the market-place constituted by job adverts and employment agencies. To run a workfare or job guarantee scheme skews the market and requires expenditure on administration, supervision, and policing, and it results in an alternative economy of the kind recently abandoned by Russia and Eastern Europe because of its chronic inefficiency. The present UK government is theoretically committed to the free market, but does not seem to have a problem with the skewed artificial market of ‘work experience’ and ‘job guarantee’.

A Citizen’s Income would make it always worthwhile for someone to seek earned income, and so would enable the employment market to function as a market. Why add to administrative costs with a job guarantee scheme when you could reduce them, and achieve better effects, by paying a Citizens Income?

Work tests, workfare, and job guarantees happen because we have a gut feeling that nobody should get something for nothing; but is not our real motive that we feel that nobody should get what we do not get? Would there still be such a psychological problem if everybody received a Citizen’s Income? Would we not be happier with the idea that some people chose to live on a small income and not have a job if we got the same small income and had a job because we wanted one?

Whatever the psychological complexities, the administrative issue is a simple one. A job guarantee, and the insistence that benefits claimants should take the jobs offered, would only add to the administrative nightmare, and the nightmare would end if we all had a Citizen’s Income.

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About the Book

101 Reasons for a Citizen’s Income offers a short, accessible introduction to the debate on a Citizen’s Income, showing how a universal, unconditional income for every citizen would solve problems facing the UK’s benefits system, tackle poverty, and improve social cohesion and economic efficiency. For anyone new to the subject, or who wants to introduce friends, colleagues or relatives to the idea, 101 Reasons for a Citizen’s Income is the book to open up debate around the topic. Drawing on arguments detailed in Money for everyone (Policy Press, 2013), it offers a convincing case for a Citizen’s Income and a much needed resource for all interested in the future of welfare in the UK.