“What is the morality of the bourgeois? Just an excuse to blow my mind, ”says Alfred, Eliza’s father, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Although distant in time, Victorian England is revived in some debates of the present day. This is the case of the campaign against citizenship income, which in tone and content has become a war against the poor.
According to Carlo Bonomi, president of Confindustria, the citizen’s income is too high and “competitive”, that is, whoever receives it compares it to the wages offered on the market and rejects them. As Chiara Saraceno wrote in the Republic, to which we owe an official and unheard report with proposals on how to improve the aforementioned income, those who think that 452 euros a month can be a disincentive to work perhaps believe it is legitimate to pay wages around those figures.
True, there is a difficulty in finding workers in some areas and in some sectors, and paradoxically this happens even if there are many unemployed: but it is happening everywhere in the rich world, in a labor market earthquake by the double shock of the pandemic and war, and nowhere does it take the mind to accuse social protection for the poorest of them. Or rather, the US right has done so, immediately denied by the evidence that the phenomenon also exists in states where there is no basic income. In Italy, on the other hand, the campaign against citizenship income is led by the association of large industrialists, by the parties that sit on the right in parliament and by Italia viva, which on June 15 will begin to collect signatures to abolish it.
A recent report by the Working Group on interventions and measures to combat in-work poverty in Italy reveals that low-paid workers (less than 11,500 euros per year) are 32.4 per cent of employees, which rises to 64.5 per one hundred among those who work in hotels and restaurants. The Italian emergency is poor work, not subsidies for the poor. It will be said that poor work corresponds to a poor productive structure, made up of marginal enterprises, which would fail if wages were increased. But it is striking that the leader of the large industrialists identifies himself with this productive structure. Finally, the campaign to demonize citizenship income increases a social stigma around those who receive it, accused of being profiteers, undeserving or slacker: that they remain dry-mouthed, and therefore make themselves available to accept any job in any condition.