Things are looking bleak right now.
The world has its first trillionaire. The wealth gap between the owning class and the working class is wider than it has ever been. The owning class is laying off workers and trying to replace them with sophisticated guessing software that they call artificial intelligence.
If all that was not bad enough, as jobs become more precarious and income becomes weaker, the owning class keeps driving up the cost of everything in their incessant thirst for profit.
It is tough for a lot of us out there.
Every so often, I see people advocating on social media for a universal basic income as a solution to this economic nightmare.
What a universal basic income (sometimes called a universal guaranteed income) looks like in practice could vary between jurisdictions, but fundamentally, it is a social welfare proposal in which all members of a given population regularly receive a minimum income in the form of an unconditional transfer payment, usually without a means test or the need to perform work.
Since incomes do not seem to be keeping up with the cost of living, people’s hopelessness are driving them toward UBI as the solution to the problem.
However, as I stated in the title, the UBI is not coming to save us.
No significant political party is advocating for it, certainly not in Canada. The country even had the start of what could have been a UBI when it implemented the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit at the start of the pandemic, but it replaced it with another programme just months later, then cancelled the replacement shortly after that.
The federal government showed us that it has the capacity to implement a UBI. They just do not want to.
It is a fruitless effort to convince our governments to implement a UBI. Most of the politicians in Canada are interested in only empowering capital, and a UBI empowers labour.
Even if one government does implement a UBI, once they lose power (which always happens eventually), it is entirely possible that the next party taking power would get rid of that UBI.
Instead of waiting around for our governments to eventually, if ever, implement a UBI, we should unionize our workplaces.
Unionizing more of the working class will do way more to improve our material conditions than waiting endlessly for a phantom UBI ever will.
By unionizing, we can have a direct say in what our material conditions looks like: how much we are paid, how long our shifts are, what conditions we work in, what health benefits we have, and so on.
Plus, if the unionization rate reaches a high enough level, we can increase the leverage we have at a class level to improve the material conditions for the entire working class, not just those who are unionized.
Heck, if the unionization rate gets high enough, maybe we can create a new economy based on the working class owning the means of production, and we can get rid of the current owning class altogether.
Politicians do not care about us, so how about we care for each other?
