The idea of giving people money – with no strings attached, simply to ensure a minimum standard of living – is enjoying a global moment. Over the last decade, the UN and the International Labour Organization (ILO) have been promoting the idea of universal social protection floors. Rather than the old-fashioned social safety net, which was there to catch those who fell, a social protection floor is a baseline to build on, typically in the form of cash to those who need it (often along with other public goods such as health care) (ILO, 2012). The 2016 Swiss referendum on instituting a universal basic income guarantee (a sum of money unconditionally and regularly disbursed to every resident – also known as a basic income grant, a negative income tax or a social dividend) garnered a huge amount of press attention around the world, despite the proposal being rejected by 77 per cent of Swiss voters. Finland, the Netherlands, Scotland, Kenya and the US are all sites of recent, ongoing or planned universal basic income experiments – some funded by national governments, some by municipalities or provinces, others by private philanthropy.

Meanwhile, conditional and unconditional cash transfers – both policy cousins of basic income – have become fashionable interventions in the world of international development. Cash transfers have moved from NGO and university-run experiments, to government welfare programmes, and have garnered the support of large mainstream development institutions. In 2015 World Bank president Jim Yong Kim and ILO director general Guy Ryder co-authored a joint mission and plan of action to promote universal social protection – to provide ‘income security and support to all people … Anyone who needs social protection should be able to access it’ (ILO and World Bank, 2015, my emphasis).

At the root of these proposals lies the possibility of something novel and radical: a partial decommodification of labour, a separation between basic livelihood and wage work. As an increasing number of people around the globe are transformed into ‘surplus populations’ no longer needed by labour markets, nor able to access land in order to provide for their own subsistence (Li, 2010, 2013), wage work has begun to look untenable as the sole source of income security.