UBI, Commons & Gig Jobs

Now that the $15 an hour minimum wage has legs, we should start the fight for how people have little chance to find a lucrative job that will last their entire working life and end with a pension and healthcare. The manufacturing jobs are either relocated to another country or just about to be eliminated by machines or robots. Retail is going by the wayside as the brick and mortar stores are replaced by online shopping. What’s left are tech jobs, service jobs, and the best—building trade jobs, which need to be union with their own healthcare, pensions and their own four-to-five-year paid training programs. The unions and workers who support them now need to fight for Project Labor Agreements on all government projects. The union workers also need to vote for leaders who will support unions and the unions need to organize all non-union trades. Also, we need to support non-labor incomes, like the Universal Basic Income (UBI) and get behind corporations paying rent for our Commons. When the corporations damage our environment, like they have in the past—air pollution, oil spills, toxic dumping—we are all impacted so remember this when the pundits on Fox, Limbaugh, Beck, etc, begin the crusade to convince you paying for the Commons is a bad idea. If people do not understand this, they should read, “With Liberty and Dividends For All” by Peter Barnes. They should also read, “Rights of Man” by Thomas Paine. The workers who have the best chance to survive are the trades, healthcare, education, tech, first responders, law enforcement, and firefighters. Even these jobs will probably be lessened by tech and robots. Labor-type manufacturing will not be back. Coal mining will not be back. Oil work will go. There is only so much government work to do because the automation will take over the humans’ jobs. It’s hard to believe, but Fox news commentators Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs agree with paying for the Commons. O’Reilly said, “It’s my contention that we, the people, own the gas and oil discovered in America. It is our land and the government administered it in our name—land and water are the domain of we, the people.” Dobbs said, “The oil that we’re talking about belongs to us, as you said. In Alaska, there’s a perfect model for what we should do as a nation. We should have—let’s call it ‘American Trust.’ Have the oil companies put their fees into that trust not to be touched by the Treasury Department or any other agency, but for investment on behalf of the American people. A couple of things then happen. One, it reminds everyone whose oil this is. And, it even puts a little money, a dollar sign on what it’s worth to be a citizen.” This fund could be paid out as dividends and could be connected to the Social Security system, which is already in place—UBI plus Social Security plus gig jobs (temporary jobs) and people might be able to survive. One only needs to look at Trump and the GOP’s recently passed tax bill, which will make America the world’s most unequal society, and as author Thomas Piketty says this tax bill will turbocharge America’s inequality, making it more of a “rentier society.” The days of children doing better than their parents are pretty much over. Children born today in poverty have fewer opportunities to make it out of their situation. UBI and compensation for our Commons are ways to counteract the devastating inequality.