Since the nineteenth century, job creation has functioned as the primary – and in many cases the sole – strategy for improving people's well-being and life prospects. Such an approach is unsuited to current realities of tightly rationed and poorly remunerated waged work, a state of affairs that is predicted to endure. The scope and intensity of this crisis of waged work is likely to increase as digital and other job-replacing technologies are introduced more widely and as the dividend-boosting pressures of financialised capitalism persist. Given such an outlook, a universal basic income grant (UBIG) holds great appeal.

This chapter surveys the background to the current crisis before examining, in the context of a ‘just transition’, the advantages of a UBIG, the arguments against and its possible pitfalls. It concludes by showing that a UBIG, rare among redistributive interventions, holds great transformative potential and challenges core tenets of capitalist ideology. That potential can only be realised if a UBIG is treated not as a passive, technical intervention but as an aspect of a broader programme of societal transformation.

THE STATE OF THINGS

Chronic high unemployment, new jobs that are mostly at the low-pay end of the scale and that lack benefits and security, stagnating or declining real incomes, social protection systems that are either absent or tightly rationed, widening income inequality – those are descriptions that used to apply almost exclusively to countries on the margins of the global economy. Today, those features are increasingly generic. Jan Breman's (2013: 131) summary of trends in ‘developed’ economies is bracing and accurate: