There is a measure in Italy that does not enjoy a good reputation: citizenship income, the support introduced in 2019 to combat poverty and facilitate the reintegration of those who apply for it. For several weeks the news pages have insisted on its limits.
The most highlighted is that among the people who receive it (on average 584 euros per month) there are also “crafty”, who have collected the money but in reality, according to the press, are owners of luxury homes, of Ferrari, sometimes they are even deceased, or they are traffickers or mafiosi who like to stay on the couch all day to be supported by society.
According to the critics, the “crafty ones” of the citizen’s income cause tax damage that affects the economic stability of the country. For example, the fifteen people reported to Rome for having received it illegally would have received a total of about 75 thousand euros, a certain significant but incomparable figure to the approximately 110 billion euros of tax evasion per year which, it must be said, is much less stigmatized in the public debate. .
There is a final limit attributed to the measure: the risk of moral subversion that it would instill in the population, the fear that those who receive the citizenship income fall in love with the “dolce far niente” that the future of the country will soon turn into a sort of dystopia in which no one will want to work, regardless of employment opportunities.
Myths and blame
To be sure, the idea that citizenship income is detrimental to society is not new: for decades conservative economists have argued that taking disadvantaged families out of poverty costs too much, is economically unsustainable, disincentives to work and, even worse. , corrupts the morality of society, that work ethic which, according to the sociologist Max Weber, ensures divine grace to those who work.
All these myths underpin the history of welfare. To cut off assistance to the poor, Reagan had invented the figure of welfare queen, the “subsidy queen,” a single black mother portrayed as a scam woman who lived on taxpayers’ money as she sped by in her Cadillac. Reagan was thus able to leverage the racist stereotypes of the United States to introduce austerity policies, presenting cuts as forms of distributive justice.
But it is from the time of thinkers like Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus and Herbert Spencer that poverty has been conceived as a fault for which the poor are solely responsible. As Economist founder James Wilson said, in response to Irish prayers for help during the 1840 famine: “Providing for others is no one’s duty.”
Dystopian scenarios
In recent months, the newspapers and Italian politics have activated a similar campaign, relying on a whole series of stereotypes to create a situation of “moral panic” capable of undermining public consent to protection measures for the less well-off. For example, the governor of Campania Vincenzo De Luca said that the citizenship income risks extinguishing the category of seasonal workers, so satisfied by the perception of 584 euros per month per family unit that they decide to give themselves full-time to ‘ leisure. De Luca’s idea is that citizenship income corrupts people to the point of leading them to “parasitism”, that is, to live behind others, transforming the refusal of work into a kind of mass epidemic that risks collapsing entire production sectors.
On closer inspection, the dystopian scenarios evoked by Italian politics to criticize citizenship income are so surreal as to be almost fascinating. On the one hand, they exasperate the image of the “crafty”, transforming the recipient of subsidies into a kind of monster, a symbol of fraud and immorality – a rhetoric that can also be observed in other countries, starting with the United States and the United United. On the other hand, they insist so much on the work ethic deficit that unemployment ceases to be the consequence of macroeconomic policies to become a personal choice.
And here the question becomes interesting, because if morality is an abstract, subjective and slippery ground of disquisition, unemployment is much less so, and although the public debate insists on the risk that the citizen’s income becomes a disincentive to work and cause mass unemployment, the truth is that this narrative overshadows a much more concrete and alarming reality: the fact that unemployment in Italy is structural, exacerbated by short-sighted political choices that over the years have dismantled the productive fabric. The result is a permanent emergency, characterized by one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe and by the continuous compression of labor costs.
In Italy, the disincentive to work does not arise from citizenship income, but from the fact that there is often no work. And when there is, it is so poor and unprotected that it is legitimate – and in some cases right – not to accept it. The emergency is represented by the chronic insufficiency of investments in production and research. A shortage that has gradually reduced the manufacturing sector, while the tertiary sector and services have assumed a central role in the Italian GDP, even if they are often characterized by a labor market with very little protection.
From this point of view, Renzi’s old slogan “come and invest here, we have the lowest wages in Europe”, well reflects the logic of the policies that have relegated Italy to being a logistic and tourist pole, letting them come the main production sectors moved abroad. In this context, the only guarantee of finding work has become the willingness to sell down.
Rethinking society
Citizenship income was born precisely as a structural response to such situations. In a famous speech given in Madrid in 1930 and then published under the title Economic prospects for our grandchildren, the British economist John Maynard Keynes foresaw that in an age of “technological unemployment” like the one we live in, survival must become an unconditional right to work. In this context, the citizenship income should be conceived as a kind of human right, say documentary filmmakers Daniel Häni and Enno Schmidt: an attempt to rethink the purposes of social life, in an era in which available jobs are shrinking. . “Citizenship income is not just an economic policy, but an ideal”, writes the journalist expert in economics and politics Annie Lowrey, because it does not refer only to a form of redistribution of wealth, but to the ethical need to rethink the meaning of our common life.
The choice is to understand whether at the end of a pandemic that has severely exacerbated the weaknesses of the Italian labor market and highlighted, as the economists Michele Raitano and Giovanni Gallo write, the imbalances of that plethora of atypical contractual forms or those made up of gray work, black and without protections, we want to dismantle even the few protections that exist.
While the government proposes, and then deletes, the criterion for assigning the maximum discount in the award of contracts – a rule heavily criticized because it would have imposed a ferocious retreat in rights, wages and security – and dismisses the proposal for an inheritance tax , we must ask ourselves whether, as a society, we want to protect the rich or the poor.
In the latter case we should tell ourselves that the citizenship income should not be opposed, but strengthened and extended. Because if in some cases it is given to those who do not need it, it is equally true that there are many more those who need it but are unable to receive it. In fact, there are still many people in poverty who do not have access to coverage, as stated in the annual report on citizenship income published in November 2020.
Perhaps the time has come to bring Italy up to date with European countries where the introduction of a universal and unconditional basic income has been experimented for years. “An income”, to use the definition of the philosopher and economist Philippe Van Parijs, “paid by a political community to all its members on an individual basis, without control of resources or the need for compensation”. In Finland and Germany this experimentation has already been introduced. In 2016 a referendum in Switzerland – later rejected – proposed to guarantee it to everyone.
Citizenship income can be extended and improved, and become accessible to all regardless of the acceptance of a job or of “congruous” training courses. For this reason it should not be considered – as happens in Italy – as an active labor policy, for which other tools should be imagined. The purpose of the citizenship income is to free people from the constraints of the market and guarantee a dignified existence for all, regardless of the role that everyone plays in the labor market. It is something like the “wind under the wings”, as Häni and Schmidt say in their documentary. And it is the least that can be asked of a society that is not only civil, but human.
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