A Universal Care Income for Europe: a degrowth proposal

FINAL DRAFT A Universal Care Income for Europe: a degrowth proposal Summary Care is fundamentally necessary work for the healthy reproduction of humans and ecosystems, but it is often invisible in a growth-driven economy. This paper proposes an unconditional Universal Care Income as a core part of the EU’s Care Deal for Europe. It is a vision of prosperity beyond growth that seeks to re-balance the care burden across genders, and centres both social and environmental care. Introduction The planetary lockdown for COVID-19 had a double result. On the one hand, it showed the importance of placing life and care activities at the centre of our social system and political concerns; on the other hand, it showed how doing so is socially and economically unsustainable for a market system obsessed with growth. For Europe to put care at the centre of political concern, we need to shift the focus of policies away from the extraction, industrial production, and consumption that is fuelling ecological and social breakdown. What if European institutions moved away from the narrow emphasis on economic growth at all costs towards the kind of prosperity that is based more on social and environmental care, regeneration, and reproduction? Welcome progress came in 2022 when the European Commission approved a resolution (COM 2022/440) to launch a Care Strategy for Europe (CSE). It was drafted in a moment of pandemic debates about the importance of essential workers, the backbone of which were formal and informal carers. However, the CSE does not go far enough. The CSE was the Commission’s response to the European Parliament’s initiatives denouncing the fact that the European Green Deal lacked a gender perspective and did not pay attention to care (EP 2019/2169). The CSE aims to facilitate access to care, improve the quality of care services and make it more affordable for all European citizens. Moreover, it aspires to improve the working conditions for care workers from the formal sector and to foster an equal gender distribution of caring activities both in the spheres of the market and at home to guarantee a fairer work-life balance among all carers. These are the Commission’s steps to implement some of the European Pillars of Social Rights, in particular, childcare and long-term elderly care. The European Commission’s approval of the CSE has opened a new policy path as care has historically largely been hidden and undervalued, creating persistent inequality against carers – the large majority of whom are women, and in particular, women from marginalised communities. As the resolution states, 90 per cent of formal care workers are women, and 7.7 million women in Europe are so burdened with unpaid care that it makes them unable to enter the job market. Researchers at European Parliamentary Research Service have defined women’s earnings lost due to care work as the “unpaid care penalty”, estimating it at a very approximate €242 billion per year. Women in Europe dedicate, on average, 2-3 more hours per day to care work than men, so up to an extra month and a half a year. It is clear that men historically tend to accumulate ‘a caring debt’ that creates structural gender inequality. However, the CSE does not offer a clear definition of care. Its narrow focus on care for children and the ageing European population implies that only special groups in society need care during specific moments of their life. Thus, it misses the importance of many daily caring activities that sustain both people and the environment. In this political brief, we argue that it is time to both relaunch and reframe this debate and that the European parliamentarians’ call for a Care Deal for Europe (EP 2021/2253) is a great opportunity to institutionalise the right to care as a ‘pillar of the European way of life’. To do so, we propose the right to an unconditional income, which we call a Universal Care Income (UCI), that should be granted across Europe to everyone, to recognise all the care work performed to sustain life. The UCI unveils and rewards the many invisible levels of self, reciprocal, and mutual care. It honours all those activities that societies and ecosystems require to be healthy and functioning, from childcare to communal forest management, from disability support to community gardens, from neighbourhood meals to seed sharing. A sustainable, equitable, and democratic Europe must be rebuilt on this shared care work. In this light, the proposed council recommendation (COM 2022/0299) on a guaranteed minimum income to raise everyone above the national poverty line is palliative. It has been shown that means-tested social policies such as this proposal, enhance social stigma and reproduce economic disparities. We argue that a universal, unconditional policy based on recognising care as the essential element that guarantees the well-being of people, their communities and the environment is the most adequate response to Europeans' multiple crises. This is the political vision upon which our proposal for a progressive ‘European Care Deal for Europe’ can be built. The UCI as core measure of a Care Deal for Europe could open the way towards a paradigm shift away from a neoliberal, market-dominated Europe, to a Europe for people, pursuing care and sufficiency for the well-being of all. What do we mean by care? Care comprises all daily activities humans perform to ensure their well-being and reproduce a healthy socio-environmental context in which they live and thrive. This includes such diverse activities as looking after children, household chores, companionship to the elderly and the sick, nourishing relationships for the sake of sustaining healthy and flourishing social bonds. Care activities also manifest in preparing a common neighbourhood meal, tending to community gardens, cleaning coastal and mountain paths, participating in communal water management and preventive activities against forest fires. While a substantial amount of time goes to caring activities – in industrial societies as in past societies – most of this work remains invisible, as only paid work is valued under capitalism. The dominant culture often – knowingly or unknowingly – embodies patriarchal values that serve capital well, depreciating this fundamental work and shifting it mainly to women. Current economic policies – and the market ideology that informs them – help obscure the time dedicated to self-care and caring for one's offspring, parents, elders, friends, home, neighbourhoods, and urban or rural environments. However, we do not want to reproduce a feelgood idea of caring that denies its aspects that involve drudgery. Caregiving often requires boring repetitive tasks, hard work, and sacrifice as in the case of turning a bed-bound person with sores, clearing up hazardous waste, or simply thinking again and again what to cook for your family members. Giving and receiving care can often be difficult, disgusting, and create stress, tension, and resentment. Caring is a daily life practice that makes the carer as well as the receiver experience interdependence and vulnerability; it is not a painless pleasure free of obligation. Our market economies present the illusion of a life without pain and effort as the apex of human emancipation and progress. The idea of liberation from drudgery remains the ideological backbone of economic growth. However, this fantasy is only available to the privileged few who can outsource the ongoing treadmill, pain, and suffering required to maintain their lifestyles to racialised and impoverished others. Thus, privileges in class, race, education, health, gender, and wealth, can help some to liberate themselves from the fatigue of life by shifting the costs to other human and non-human beings that suffer the effects of exploitation, contamination, or ecological depredation. The lack of dignity attributed to care work is linked to the fact that it is women that do the majority of this work. It is not a surprise then that it was radical feminist thinkers that first revealed the importance of care and developed economic theories focused on the reproduction of life, debates enriched and expanded by ecofeminism. Degrowth for care Many feminists have shown that serious engagement with care labour is in tension with the formality and detachment that characterise the economic sphere and the growth-led mode of production. This tension is exemplified in priorities, in where resources are put, in the relationships you want to see flourish. Some feminists have highlighted this tension focusing particularly on reproductive and care work. Care follows an illness's biological time or the seasons’ cyclical time; the economy instead follows a linear notion of time, seeking to increase productivity and efficiency. As efficiency and productivity underpin the hiring process and employment for example, mothers can slow down productivity due to the care work babies and young children require, and thus people with no care duties tend to be generally more successful professionally. Time marks a fundamental distinction between (market-based) production and (nonmarket) social (re)production. In care, time is not allocated based on efficiency but follows the rhythms of human bodies and nature: the sick person must be attended to at the moment of need, the needs of a newborn must be met as they arise, the seed sowed during a specific season. In neoliberal capitalist societies, time is clocked and follows the logic of maximising profit. Market productivism is thus at odds with the time of care in that it is led by the ups and downs of supply and demand and uprooted from the ecological times of regeneration and reconstitution of ecosystems. Consequently, most people cannot easily shrink their formal working hours without being (heavily) penalized by employers or the broader social context. Furthermore, the time for care work is relational and cannot be perfectly substituted, e.g. paid babysitting is not the same as parenthood. Paying a babysitter under the pressure of employers, rather than by choice, has a social and a moral cost. This is mostly manifested in naturalising the imperative to earn money to ‘live well’ above the capacity to be present and care. Care activities are, therefore, increasingly commodified, submitted to the logic of economic growth rather than human choices. This is why a ‘Caring Europe’ needs to abandon the obsession with economic growth. Degrowth scholars and activists put care at the core of their proposals for transformation to enhance and improve the life conditions of formal and informal carers, re-balance the care burden across genders, and guarantee the ‘freedom to care’. A common trap into which multiple care-focused public policies such as the CSE can enter is valorising market arrangements and the freedom to enter the job market as superior to the freedom to care. Growth-driven economies seek solutions that privilege those caring processes that are monetized, commodified, or even off-sourced. Such approaches tend to undo social bonds and increase overall energy demand; household energy demand is less intensive than the service care sector, as for example, professional care activities imply a lot more commuting (which is very energy intensive). In contrast, degrowth advocates for public policies that promote nearby ‘care infrastructure’ that facilitates the non-commodified care process, including self-organised mutual support. In this strand, forms of living and producing, such as cohousing and parental collectives that care for their children, form a crucial piece of the communal economy. What policy frameworks such as the CSE also fail to recognise is the crucial role of community-based care services, like voluntary associations of animal care, food banks, collective litter picking on coastal and mountain paths, forest communal management, or social solidarity health clinics. To do so, public authorities must guarantee that resources and space such as for example buildings, or public tool libraries, are provided for mutual support and local self-organisation that promote care beyond binary family kinships. A society of care furthermore requires working time reduction so that people have the time and physical and emotional resources for care and its commoning. Along with radical feminist writers such as Silvia Federici, degrowth advocates see care and reproduction activities as a collective endeavour. They argue the concept of caring extends beyond the household sphere, and include many activities that pertain to maintaining the integrity of life such as communal water management and biodiversity protection, for example. Indeed, in the context of the global south, the activities performed by subsistence communities like agro-pastoralists and artisanal fishers in maintenance work for their surrounding ecosystems is care work. Why a Universal Care Income? A Universal Care Income aims to visibilise and recognise the centrality of caring and reproductive work, honouring and giving material support to those who – whether they want to or not – make the material, psychological and emotional effort involved in the reproduction of life day after day. The proposal is for a Universal Care Income consisting of an unconditional and differentiated monetary transfer that all adults living in Europe should receive every month – for example, an amount above the poverty line established as 60 per cent of the median income in a country, i.e. at least €1150 in Germany and €815 in Italy. This income should be universal and unconditional because the care work done to meet the material needs of human and non-human life is done by everyone and should be compensated by collectively produced wealth. Importantly, however, we argue that the Universal Care Income should be differentiated between genders, mostly because women have historically contributed more to our societies’ care work and should receive proportionally more than their male peers. This approach is rooted in the feminist campaign for a wage for domestic work in Italy in the 1970s, which became an international movement. It rejected the assumptions that care activities were ‘naturally’ feminine, and did not count as producing value and welfare for society. The women's movement showed the exploitation of predominantly male workers at the factory was linked to the exploitation of women in the kitchen. To ask for a wage for domestic work was to demand the owners of capital pay the cost of the hours and hours of unpaid work involved in reproducing the workers upon which their capital investments expanded. Today the campaign for UCI goes beyond this early idea of wages for housework, promoting as it does the idea that care and reproductive work are not just in the realm of the household but involving collaboration in community and ecosystems. Indeed, as argued in the previous section, there is an indissoluble relationship between human beings, communities, and their environment. What these spheres have in common is precisely the effort to care for human beings and their health, for urban commons, for agricultural land and forests, for the water cycle and climate, and for non-human life and the ecological systems that support it. Consequently, capital appropriates the care and reproductive work women and men do to sustain life on Earth, and this is what a UCI aims to redistribute back. A Universal Care Income for Europe We have argued above that the proposal of a Universal Care Income should be at the forefront of any European care strategy, reinforcing its principles and acting as the first attempt to challenge growth dependence in Europe. The UCI proposal aims to reformulate the idea for a Universal Basic Income on a materialist principle, according to which an unconditional income has to be recognised for the work done for caring for human and non-human beings and habitats. Regarding the practical design, including the income amount and approach to the disbursement of the UCI, we propose it should be set at a minimum level above the poverty line of each European country. Yet, in order to avoid a narrow, discriminating and top-down implementation, a larger-scale public debate over questions of compensation for care and reproductive work need to take place within safe spaces for discussion. This is in order to attune the proposal to the sensibilities and necessities of various localities. We believe that the actual design of such measure should be geographically and place-based, considering the multiple subjectivities and typologies of care work in practice. In 2019 civil society launched a progressive and leftist proposal for a European Green New Deal. Its proponents included in their post-growth programme a proposal for a care income to reward reproductive activities of caring for people in urban and rural environments and regenerating (human and non-human) ecosystems. Since then, and in synergy with leading Global Women’s Strike network activists, the proponents of that policy have been promoting a care income worldwide. For the campaigners, putting the focus on care and reproductive work challenges the economic growth model and the care crises it has led to. There are different ideas on how to implement the UCI, and once it becomes part of the political agenda, there will be plenty of room to discuss the actual design and implementation in diverse localities. As an illustration, some feminist movements in rural areas around the world demand as a care income access to land over cash payments. Box 1: On the Care Income in Italy* Italian women do reproductive chores and care for more than double the time men do. Fig 1 shows the introduction of a Basic Income, a Care Income and both policies in combination with a Working Time Reduction. The first important result concerns the female and male income levels ratio. It shows that Care Income, and Care Income plus Working Time Reduction, are the best policies to reduce the income gender gap in Italy. In particular, the Care Income plus Working Time Reduction policies increase the ratio to 0.90. Fig. 1 Ratio between female and male gross income ratio according to the different scenarios generated by the implementation of BI, CI, WTR and a combination of BI and WTR, and a CI and WTR, when compared to the baseline scenario. The core equity principle of a universal care income aims to give more to those who contribute more to caring; thus, even more interesting is the result shown in Fig. 2, i.e. a Care Income plus Working Time Reduction policy combination increases the gross income growth rate for unemployed and retired females substantially. Those better off with this combination policy are middle and low skilled women, who normally do more unpaid work overall. Fig. 2 Accumulated (2010 – 2040) nominal non–financial income growth rate by gender and skill according to the different scenarios generated by the implementation of a combination of BI and WTR, and a CI and WTR, when compared to the baseline scenario the results of a working in progress on the application of a care income in Italy D’Alisa G. is developing with Cieplinski A., D’Alessandro S., D’Alisa G., Guarnieri P. In Box 1, we present one possible implementation presenting the actual introduction of a UCI in Italy. In this case UCI is coupled with a medium-term policy of reducing working time and this scenario is compared with the implementation of a UBI policy. As a mental exercise based on an approach where women are paid more for historical and present care work (as a form of a UCI), we empirically estimate the impacts of such policy applied to the Italian reality (Box 1). In this case, UCI is mainly funded with a progressive increase in taxation for those in higher income brackets. The preliminary results show that those that benefit more from such a policy are those that do more care work (on average): middle-aged low-skilled women. As per empirical evidence, much of the experimentation that has been taking place in the field of Basic Income clearly indicates that women with substantial care-work responsibilities are the ones who (on average) benefit most from the schemes. Box 2 presents some key findings of the B-Mincome pilot in Barcelona demonstrating how existing socio-economic vulnerabilities among women were (partially) addressed by the experiment. Thus it illustrates the enormous need for a new type of a Basic Income, one that is particularly tailored to care-givers, and enhances the desirability of care-work across the board. Box 2: The B-Mincome pilot in Barcelona, and its relevance for a potential UCI application in Europe B-Mincome aimed to test the efficiency and effectiveness of combining economic aid in the form of Municipal Inclusion Support (MIS, i.e. a guaranteed minimum income) with social policies (related to employment, social economy, community participation and housing) in Barcelona’s Eix Besòs area. The MIS was provided to 915 households, randomly selected from the users of municipal social services. The maximum amount a household could get was €1676 per month. The programme included modalities such as the obligation to participate in a range of social policies, or the introduction of means-testing, which reduced the monetary benefit whenever household earnings surpassed a set threshold. The project is relevant to the question of a UCI in that women comprised the group majority, representing about 2/3 of all beneficiaries. Almost all of them had substantial care-work load, and up to 86 per cent of all participants had children under 18. Almost all participants enjoyed a greater sense of financial and material well-being as a result of receiving the B-MINCOME income and were better able to meet their household’s needs for food, clothing, household essentials, and services. Crucially, many women spent the income on improving their children’s lives, including tuition pay (eg attending semiprivate schools), or enrollment in extracurricular activities. Others used the benefit to pay for care services and medications that were otherwise inaccessible for them (due to gaps in public provisioning, for example). For a minority of participants, employment was unlikely to become a realistic possibility or goal, due to poor health or extensive caring responsibilities, especially for single mothers. For these people, B-MINCOME provided a much-needed financial safety net. The common profile of B-Mincome recipient clearly manifests the higher rates of economic vulnerability among women, all driven by pervasive gender and racial discrimination. As a result of the income some women felt empowered within the family unit, and challenged abusive relationships and existing gender roles. It was mostly women that opted to join the community participation project modality (making 77 per cent of all participants), even though the activity was open to all household members associated with the scheme. Through these activities’ women created new, or expanded and rebuilt existing social networks. These spaces proved to be fundamental sources of solidarity in moments of social exclusion, gender violence or economic vulnerability. One notable example is the Dones Cosidores collective, established as a result of the project. This community initiative promotes the self-employment of women from various ethnic backgrounds in the field of sewing. UCI: Objections and responses Here are our responses to six potential issues that the implementation of UCI could raise. Is there a chance that the UCI could reward more rich women that do little care work than poor men who do lots of care work? On the one hand, UCI is a policy that recognises the enormous care debt that the vast majority of men have towards women. It addresses women as a collective subject to patriarchal values and not as individuals subject to a specific workload. Similarly to the ecological debt owned by the colonial global north to the global south, the UCI should be framed as a type of reparation for historical patriarchal injustice towards women. However, high-income women will not receive more than low-income men if the implementation of the UCI is associated with a progressive increase in income taxation, as is the case we presented in Box 1. In this example high-income Italian women receive more, but they also pay much more in taxes than low-income men; therefore low income men will be better-off after the implementation of UCI. Thus, to properly address the intersectionality of power and privileges, the UCI needs to be accompanied by other complementary policies such as progressive income taxation, the establishment of income ceilings, as well as working time reduction and job-guarantee schemes, as suggested in the broader degrowth literature. Doesn’t the UCI reproduce gender binaries? The UCI proposed in this political brief indeed differentiates between genders, in order to address a patriarchal legacy which forces women to do much more care work. Consequently, they have to be rewarded proportionally. However, the proponents have no intention of discriminating against individuals who identify as transgender or gender non-conforming and are subjugated to a complementary power asymmetry. Therefore, we maintain that UCI implementation needs to be place-based and democratically designed to avoid reinforcing gender roles and stereotypes and to address intersectional domination. Doesn’t paying women more, further cement their role as primary carers? Can’t men say, ‘you are being paid more, so do more’? Indeed, some feminist writing suggests that a Basic Income could confine women to the household, especially when the gains of the marginal income obtained from the labour market are inferior to the monthly UBI benefit. Others, however, argue that such policy measures could grant women baseline economic autonomy, fostering their position visà-vis the household and the capacity to negotiate the distribution of care-related responsibilities. A universal care income could also give women the time to develop the skills and training they need to earn a better living. However, the outcome of such a huge redistributive policy that will change a series of social and economic incentives will not be linear, as it will also depend on a series of cultural traits that vary across geographies. As the pilot implementation of a Basic Income in Barcelona indicates (Box 2), women who receive the monthly allowance were empowered at the family and societal level, while feeling economically safer to break away from abusive relationships. How does UCI differ from Universal Basic Income? Isn’t it strategically unwise to start a parallel campaign to UBI that already has a certain momentum and split efforts in two? Supporters of different political visions defend a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a political economy measure to tackle contemporary social and environmental challenges. On the one hand, there is the Anglo-Saxon liberal tradition, which in most cases supports UBI for instrumental reasons such as to guarantee the capitalist arrangement of the society. On the other hand, there is the European social-republicans’ tradition, which supports UBI so that people are able to enjoy the adequate material conditions of life, which current economic arrangements do not provide for. However, while political ambitions between experiments differ, none of the narratives have as their core the recognition of care and reproduction work humans individually and collectively do for their personal and community well-being, and in maintaining a healthy ecosystem. This materialist approach that follows the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” is very different from both the liberal and neoliberal versions of UBI. However, it does aspire to reinforce the argument of the socialrepublicans that have argued in favour of the UBI over the last two decades. It is not by chance that recently the latter has been more and more open to integrating radical feminists' claims and criticisms in their research and campaigns. What UCI aspires to do is to make care and material needs core arguments of existing campaigns. One strand of the UBI universe which is particularly well aligned with the UCI is the Unconditional Autonomy Allowance (UAA) proposal. Inspired by critical political theory, the UAA is indeed meant to redistribute paid and unpaid work while enhancing mutual aid, voluntary and social activity, community care, political activism, and democratic decision-making. As mentioned in Box1, a UCI is funded by means of increasing progressive taxation. Importantly, evaluations of current UBI experiments are charted by rather narrow and market-liberal orientations, focusing largely on the extent to which the measure enhances employability. However, from a critical political, feminist and care-based standpoint, and in a context of increasing “in-work poverty”, “bullshit jobs”, and decreasing job meaningfulness, the core achievement of the UBI should not be measured by the level of improved employability as is common in the evaluation literature. Mental and bodily health, access to education and basic services, including housing, and gender justice need to be seen as the primary metrics of success, whether for UBI or UCI. In that respect, many short-term UBI experiments score reasonably well, as shown in the example in Box 2 from Barcelona. How do we know that a UCI will have positive social effects? Just as the ‘wages for housework’ demand was never meant as a stand-alone policy for the movement in the 1970s, the B-Mincome application of the UBI demonstrates that cash transfers for women accompanied by policies that strengthen community ties and social bonding can result in the establishment of solidarity networks, work-related and infamily emancipation (see Box 2). How will a UCI be financed? Will it not take public revenue out of other important public services? Won’t it increase debt, especially in the context of degrowth that you advocate here? In the framework of Care Deal for Europe, we propose an income paid using the longterm EU and Next Generation EU budgets. In general, potential sources for a UCI include progressive income and wealth taxation (including 100 per cent rates for amounts that have been democratically established) as common pathways to collect more than the required amount for provisioning a UCI for Europe. Other avenues include taxes on resource extraction and financial transactions, while prohibiting tax havens and tax breaks for large-scale corporations. This could be done more easily if the campaign for UCI was associated with, for example, the ‘billionaire campaign’ to implement fairer taxation. Financed through a substantial change in taxation structure, UCI will not significantly affect public debt. Conclusion The Universal Care Income for Europe offers a model of prosperity based on the recognition of care work within and across societies, and addresses the profound and cumulative debt burdens across genders. The UCI, we have argued, needs to be considered a core piece of the EU’s Care Deal for Europe, not least because the debates and processes generated around its design and implementation, are fundamental to address the urgent need for explicit, material, and intersectional gender justice. Finally, the UCI is also very well aligned to help address the multiple environmental challenges we currently face. Further Reading Bloemen S., and van Woerden W. (2021) Manifesto for a Caring Economy. Commons Network. https://www.commonsnetwork.org/2021/11/10/manifesto-for-a-caring-society/ D’Alisa G., Demaria F., Kallis G (2015) Degrowth a vocabulary for new era. Routledge Eicker and Keil (2017). Who cares? Towards a convergence of feminist economics and degrowth in the (re)valuation of unpaid care work. https://www.exploring-economics.org/en/discover/who-cares/ Picchio A. (ed) (2003). Unpaid Work and the Economy A Gender Analysis of the Standards of Living Routledge. Available in open access here Robeyns, I. (2010). “Feminism, Basic Income and the Welfare State”, in Bauhardt C., Çağlar G. (eds.), Gender and Economics. Salleh A. (2017) Ecofeminism as politics: Nature, Marx and the postmodern. Zed Books Ltd. Sekulova, F., Bonilla, F. & Laín, B. 2023. Life Satisfaction and Socio-Economic Vulnerability: Evidence from the Basic Income Experiment in Barcelona. Applied Research Quality Life. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-023-10176-x The care collective (2020) The Care Manifesto. Verso. Tronto J. (2013). Caring Democracy. Markets, Equality and Justice. NYU Press Vincent Liegey et al., Un projet de Décroissance, Manifeste Pour Une Dotation Inconditionnelle d’Autonomie, Editions Utopia, January 2013 Waring, M. (2003). Counting for something! Recognising Women's Contribution to the Global Economy through Alternative Accounting Systems. Gender and Development, 11 (1), 35–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/741954251