[R&D Barcelona] New Policy Brief Universal Care Income
Giorgos
From: 'Alexandra Mestre' via R&D Barcelona <degrowth-...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wed, Jul 2, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Subject: [R&D Barcelona] New Policy Brief UCI
To: R&D Barcelona <degrowth-...@googlegroups.com>
Dear all,
We’re pleased to share with you our latest Policy Brief, produced by Giacomo D’Alisa, Filka Sekulova, and the Research & Degrowth team, feel free to share it within your circles!
“A Universal Care Income for a Caring and Sustainable Europe”
Read the full PB here: https://degrowth.org/blog/2025/06/17/uci-for-europe/ and check out our social media posts.
In this brief, we introduce the concept of a Universal Care Income (UCI) — a non-means-tested income granted to everyone performing socially and ecologically essential care work. This includes childcare, eldercare, ecological restoration, community support, and more.
Why is this important for degrowth?
Degrowth envisions a society that thrives without relying on endless economic growth. A UCI supports this transition by:
Recognizing and remunerating care and reproductive labor often ignored by GDP
Enabling people to step away from destructive or meaningless jobs
Providing security for those engaging in collective, regenerative, and solidarity-based activities
Shifting value systems away from productivism toward care and ecological balance
How can it be financed?
The brief outlines clear options: progressive taxation on income and wealth, taxes on financial transactions, taxes on resource extraction, eliminating tax havens, and redirecting EU public funds (including Next Generation EU). UCI can be implemented without deepening public debt — and without cutting existing public services.
Thank you for being part of this broader movement for justice, care, and ecological transition.
Warmly,
|
||||||||||||||
|
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R&D Barcelona" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to degrowth-group-...@googlegroups.com.
Halina Brown
Thank you, Giorgos and Alexandra, for sharing this very interesting policy brief on UCI for caring work (July 2). While I share your goals, I also have, those not listed at the end of the document.
- One of the premises presented in the opening of the brief is that men have accumulated “a caring debt”. But using the same logic, wouldn’t it be true to say that women have accumulated “an income debt” to men? Here, I am not talking about the fact that women have, and continue to, earn less money than men for the same kind of work, and that they are often bypassed for promotion in favor of men. Rather, I refer to the fact that in traditional marriages one partner often choses to work part time to be able to care for others in the family and to give the other partner a support in working full time and building a career that financially supports the family. And that women have traditionally been that part-time partner (though I am glad to say that this is rapidly changing these days).
Stated differently, both sides in this family arrangement contribute to the overall family budget, one through money and the other through uncompensated labor.
- My biggest concern is that the monetizing the caring work will radically change the way we treat that work. Our society is already obsessed with money; the recognition for professional achievements is expressed through money, which feeds individualism and cutthroat competition among people. Success in life is conflated with financial success. UCI will feed into this way of thinking.
Is UCI a motivator for people to engage in care work, or is it a thank-you note for people who would engage in this work in any case, or would like to do this work but instead are performing paid labor to earn a living? It makes a difference. The former turns care work into a transaction (I will do it if I get paid for it), which is vulnerable to any future budget cuts for this program. The latter is a good idea but this thank-you note can be expressed differently, for example by paying people better wages in their other jobs and shortening the work week or providing better institutional support to the recipients of care work.
And then, there are the questions of implementation. If we were to start paying people to work toward the good of the community, this effort would have to be recorded, kept track of, measured in the number of hours spent and the value of that work. And what of the people falsely claiming to work for the community or in care? Will someone have to verify it?
- The pilots of UBI show positive outcomes for the people receiving them. It works because the recipients have more purchasing power. But if UBI was expanded to everybody, the results could easily be that the providers of the necessary goods and services will simply raise their prices, leading to inflation and undermining the benefits observed in the small-scale trials. As best I know, this is what happened in the U.S. in response to government subsidies for college students to cover the cost of very high tuition; universities raised their tuition.
- Yes, we need to support care and the people who provide it. But the UCI might backfire.
P.s. I will not be surprised if my position on UCI triggers anger and objections from some colleagues who may think me anti-feminist, etc. So let me add a few personal facts: Until my retirement a few years ago I had a demanding and flourishing full-time academic career while rearing two children (who are middle age now) and taking care of my aging parents in another city. During the first half of my career, I often found myself the only professional woman at meetings. The last 8 years of my mother’s life she had a dementia requiring a 24-hour care and I was solely responsible for arranging for that help, which meant that for 8 years I traveled every 3 weeks to their city. I am also a volunteer expert sustainability activist in my home city, to which I devote many hours a week. Finally, I am a co-founder and board member of SCORAI, with no compensation or even reimbursements for expenses.
I do not think that I should have been paid for all that caring work, but I wish that childcare and elderly care were widely available, affordable, and valued. For example, a government stipend paid to my mother (not me) for her care would have helped to defray these costs. Better salaries for people providing child and adult care are also necessary.
I very much welcome a discussion among SCORAI-ers.
|
|
|
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R&D Barcelona" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to
degrowth-group-...@googlegroups.com.
--
* Subscribe to this mailing list:
scorai+s...@googlegroups.com
* SCORAI website: https://scorai.net
* Subscribe to the SCORAI newsletter: https://scorai.net/join
* Submit an item to the next newsletter: newsl...@scorai.net
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SCORAI" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to
scorai+un...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/scorai/CAE8RkL_02cRvw3Ukc8S8VK5K1iQHN8mQHZrcOL7O0qCmnS_aqg%40mail.gmail.com.
Robert Rattle
Hi Halina,
I agree with your concerns.
I'm uncomfortable how the UCI is differentiated from a UBI. While
the report uses 'care' to reframe the basic income discourse - as
the report states it intends to "relaunch and reframe this (care?)
debate" - using care then makes it more prescriptive and
conditional which could lead to limited ability to claw it back
for high income earners, penalising low income earners. The means
test for 'care' also leaves open considerable latitude for
interpretation and modification as governments change.
I may be mistaken, but I interpreted a UCI as more restrictive and stigmatising than a UBI because: "It should be given because everyone does care work that contributes to our commonwealth." [emphasis added] What about those cared for? Do they not have value? A UBI values people/citizens for who they are, and does not create a stigma from being 'unproductive', which for me is exactly what 'care' has been defined as here - as Halina notes, the UCI monetises and commodifies care.
Robert