It’s almost a tautology to say that the worst jobs are also the worst paid. Cleaning toilets, for example, or sweatshop manufacturing, or toiling in a mail-order fulfillment warehouse.
At a first naive look this seems odd. The worst jobs ought to pay more. It ought to be the case that in order to get people to do them you’d have to pay a good amount of money. How else would Big Store Plc ever attract enough people to run a 24/7 operation, how would a hotel ever get all its bowls sparkling?
But the dominating factor isn’t that these kinds of jobs are unpleasant, it’s that they are low skilled with low barriers to entry: anybody can walk in off the street and with minimal training they can do the job. It’s this that drives wages down. The demand for even sub-minimum wage is sufficient that the offered pay never rises. It also drives poor working conditions and minimises perks. It makes everything worse.
Demand, of sorts
The only thing that’s going to improve wages and conditions is reducing the level of demand for such jobs. Of course “demand” is a misnomer in this situation: nobody ever demands to undertake low-skilled labour. Rather, they feel compelled to undertake it. This compulsion is driven by money, namely the lack of it.
The act of exchanging labour for money isn’t intrinsically a bad thing. In fact it’s a great thing – without it we’d still be subsistence farmers – and it’s what makes our modern culture possible. The problem here is that the price of this labour has fallen so low that it’s constrained only by law: the minimum wage. In lieu of wages dropping further, conditions and contracts are made worse.
The willingness of people to exchange their labour for so little money is compounded by the ever-present drive to reduce social security payments. In our age of enforced austerity the typical low-skilled labourer is trapped. Minimal benefits and the sanctions regime means they can’t afford not to work and the need to take work, any work, at whatever level of payment, collectively drives down wages.
Pushing the down up
A good proportion of the people trapped in low-skilled, low payed jobs aren’t intrinsically low-skilled themselves. They aren’t stupid. It’s not that they couldn’t become higher-skilled; many will have skills already that just aren’t being used. But they’re trapped. They can’t not take the low skill work at low wages.
If only they had room for maneuver they could lift themselves out of the trap.
Naturally this doesn’t apply to everyone but, happily, it doesn’t need to. The simple existence of a way out, and a proportion of would-be employees taking it, would lower the “demand” for unpleasant jobs enough to push up wages and improve conditions.
Liberation
The Universal Basic Income provides this space for maneuver. It enables people to step back from compelled drudgery, to upskill, to start micro-businesses, to join the gig economy, to escape. By removing the compulsion to take any job, however awful, improves wages and conditions for everyone.
It changes the balance of employment. Instead of a big employer, in concord with the government, compelling individuals to give their labour in return for as little as possible, an individual can offer to make that exchange from a position of relative power. It’s a liberation.
Inopportune thoughts 