Life after Work: The Impact of Basic Income on Nonemployment Activities

Abstract

Basic income experiments tend to show some decline in work hours, but less is known about how that nonwork time is spent. This article uses data from a randomized controlled trial of a guaranteed annual income to examine the activities of recipients who left the labor force for some amount of time. In particular, we analyze the reasons respondents gave for not working. We find that the intervention led to growth in care work activities and education, especially among women, moderate growth in self-employment, relatively strong growth in the portion of men and women simply reporting that they did not want to work, and the strongest growth in nonemployment connected to dissatisfaction with work/job conditions. Finally, the sole nonemployment category that declines as a result of the experiment is health-related reasons for not working.

Basic Income and the Social Investment State: Towards Mutual Reinforcement?

“…Although it remained understudied until the 2010s, the Mincome experiment conducted in Manitoba, Canada in the 1970s has given evidence that providing an unconditional guaranteed income - in this case, through a negative income tax - may generate a modest decline in working hours for some sub-groups (Calnitsky and Latner, 2017). But, in most cases, the slight decrease in waged employment translated into increased engagement in socially useful activities, including education and self-employment, rather than a shift towards more “leisure” understood as personal recreation activities (Calnitsky et al, 2019). Impressive positive schooling effects were also observed in some of the U.S. negative income tax experiments conducted in the same period (Levine et al, 2005; Mallar, 1977).…”

An unconditional basic income is necessary but insufficient to transition towards just food futures

“…The effects of BI on agricultural-labour availability need careful consideration. BI pilot research suggests that BI doesn't affect labour-market participation but can cause shifts in overall employment patterns (Calnitsky & Latner, 2017;Calnitsky, Latner, & Forget, 2019;Forget, 2011;Kangas, Jauhiainen, Simanainen, & Ylikännö, 2019). Anecdotally, farmers in the 2020 growing season reported that the structure of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) discouraged some farm workers from working full-time jobs or caused them to turn down farm employment altogether.…”

Universal Basic Income as a Promoter of Real Freedom in a Digital Future

“…The idea that income received free of charge would be a subsidy to lower labor costs in order to save employers was therefore discredited. Opposition to the Manitoba experiment arose precisely because employers perceived MINCOME as a threat to their businesses (Calnitsky, 2019;Calnitsky & Latner, 2017;Calnitsky et al, 2019). While the most recent analysis of MINCOME data leads to the conclusion that many concerns about basic income cannot be proven on an empirical basis, other work has completely disproved that having income without work can result in a withdrawal from the labor market (Banerjee et al, 2017) or massive spending of money on leisure goods such as cigarettes or alcohol (Evans & Popova, 2017).…”

“…As seen, the data that we have available on the first trials of UBI show that the receivers do not implement self-destructive behaviors, such as excessive consumption of alcohol and smoking, by spending basic income (Evans & Popova, 2017); on the contrary, they perceive psychophysical improvement (Kangas et al, 2019) and especially a different horizontal relationship with the employer that helps them to defend themselves from having to accept underpaid jobs, offers them more choices and favors changes in job offers that are more in line with the wishes and attitudes of the workers (Calnitsky et al, 2019). Another aspect emerges from the analysis of the interviews of Dauphin's receivers in the Manitoba experiment: the receivers living in the city invest more in social relations, interacting and shaping themselves with their neighbors who are also receivers, thus creating social networks whose effects are to deepen with new community studies (Calnitsky, 2019).…”