A few quotes from Kathi Weeks in “Anti/Postwork Feminist Politics and a Case for Basic Income”:
“The version [of UBI] that I want to defend is for a minimal liveable income regularly remitted as a social wage, paid unconditionally to residents regardless of citizenship status, regardless of family or household membership, and regardless of past, present, or future employment status. Waged work would not be replaced by such a social wage, but the link between work and income would be relaxed, allowing more room for different ways of engaging in, or possibly opting out of, waged labour.
“The unemployed, unemployable, unwaged, precariously employed, overworked, and people who do not love their work may be suffering not primarily from the lack of a good job (whatever that might entail), but from a lack of income together with the dogma, widely disseminated and enforced throughout society, that work is liberating and that having a job is the only path to a worthy life.”
“The ideology of work – that cultural overvaluation of work that sings the praises of hard work for long hours as an individual calling, moral obligation, and social duty; that prescribes waged work as the essential requirement for independence, primary path to self-development, and singular opportunity for self-expression; and that encourages us to organise our lives around and invest our identities in work– remains a crucial support system for an economy that accumulates great wealth for a few and lifetimes of poorly or non-paid and all-consuming waged and unwaged work for the rest of us.”