This talk by feminist economist Prue Hyman was on the Sunday Supplement programme,  National  Radio May 17, 1998

Wherever we look, less and less is required of firms in terms of regulation and information provision, all in the name of reducing costs of government and/or business. Whether it’s food labelling to reveal genetically changed materials or odometer readings on car imports, it’s now ‘let the individual buyer beware’.

At the same time, individuals and families are having more and more responsibility put on them, with less and less assistance from government. The Code of Social Responsibility is a prime example. You must be there for your children, make sure they’re at school, and look after them. At the same time you, as a solo parent, must get out into the paid workforce fast. So looking after kids is rightly seen as important and real work in one breath but not in the next, where the need for support is constructed as dependency and saving government expenditure as paramount. And where are the jobs and cheap high quality childcare?

Then there’s the Community Wage. This scheme may at least be an unspoken admission that full employment at decent wages cannot be achieved at present, maybe never, even though there is much useful work to be done. But politicians pretends the jobs could be there if only the unemployed were more motivated, trained harder and looked more. In fact even for the highly educated, employment is scarce, and we suffer from many people being over-employed for ridiculously long weeks while others, anxious for full time work, are out of work or in part time casualised low paid jobs.

If we genuinely valued caring work for children, the infirm elderly, and other dependent people, we’d spread the paid and unpaid work more evenly between us all, and especially between men and women. We’d recognise that unpaid work in the home, the community and voluntary organisations is real work, however much a labour of love. We’d realise that it’s largely arbitrary what work is paid and what unpaid, and that getting most of our status, identity and claims on resources from paid work is unbalanced. Almost all jobs are done side by side by paid AND unpaid workers - in caring and home maintenance work, management and agriculture, CABs and refuges, meals on wheels and Kohanga Reo, schools and hospitals. In fact it’s been estimated that more than half of all work is unpaid, and this may be increasing. The Time Use survey will tell us more. For example, deinstitutionalisation in the mental health field and shortening hospital stays after operations and childbirth puts more unpaid work onto family relatives.

However, VALUING all the unpaid work properly does not mean paying for it by the hour. Instead, valuing this work and asserting our common citizenship, interdependence, and sense of community over individual values is best done through a Universal Basic Income. This recognises that almost all adults (and most children) make, and want to make, valuable contributions to society. It could remove the stigma and policing of some benefits, and the encouragement in unpleasant advertisements to dob in your neighbour for fraud. It could save millions in wasteful administration of welfare. It’s the alienation resulting from poverty, victim blaming, and inequality that produces what little cheating there is - together with seeing white collar crime and money laundering on a much larger scale.

A Universal Basic Income and resurgence of community values could reverse the trends towards individualism and selfishness. Of course we all care about ourselves, and our immediate family, as well as the wider community. But the government’s push to individualism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we know society is constructed so we don’t look after each other, we have to become selfish. If we’re trusted more, almost all of us will live up to it. On workfare, I was struck by hearing recently "I’ll mow the old lady’s lawn, but not because you something well tell me I have to!"