Supporting people with additional needs and obligations: universal basic income and workplace equity for disabled people and informal carers

Vollständiger Abstract

Worum geht es in dieser Arbeit?

This article explores some of the challenges presented by the implementation of universal basic income (UBI) for disabled people, including its potential implications for access to employment and income security. The question of a ‘job guarantee’, which is often presented as a mechanism to mitigate the assertion that UBI will somehow facilitate free-riding or the liberation of idleness in an apparently work-shy population, raises significant questions when explored in relationship to disabled people, who are already multiply disadvantaged in the workplace, especially for those for whom conventional understandings of work and normative ways of thinking about working time and workspaces may be entirely inappropriate and inaccessible. It also articulates these challenges in relation to the experiences of informal carers, whose lives and opportunities are currently linked to those of the disabled people they support and who, like many disabled people, are not meaningfully represented within current trade union bargaining structures and activities.