Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Sabaté, Marc-Antoine

Titel

Activating the Unemployed or Liberating the Employed? Universal Basic Income in the French Welfare Reform Debate

Ist Teil von

• Universal Basic Income in Historical Perspective, p.151-180

Ort / Verlag

Cham: Springer International Publishing

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Universal Basic Income has attracted growing interest in France over the last decade, most notably in 2017, when the socialist candidate Benoît Hamon made it a centrepiece of his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency. French UBI supporters see it not only as a response to persistent poverty and alarming waves of automation, but as a ‘new pillar’ of the welfare state. This chapter sets France’s contemporary debate over UBI in historical context, and shows how the process of welfare reform which has taken place since the 1980s—associated particularly with the development of guaranteed income schemes to alleviate poverty and encourage work—along with influential narratives of state crisis and job scarcity, progressively made it possible for UBI to appear as a radical but legitimate alternative. In doing so, it aims to shed light on one of UBI’s decisive paradox, that is, that it is proposed as a way to both activate the unemployed and liberate the employed.