You can work a job that pays $1200 a month, and the program will chip in the rest to top it up.
This is not so people will do crappy jobs that pay very little, but instead so they can pursue things that otherwise don't pay very well, like working at a charity or other non-profit with a very slim budget.
Actually, this system would pay you the money unconditionally, and any money you make goes on top of that. It's a system that encourages work. However, it's going to encourage people to do work that makes them happy, because it's no longer necessary to work just to survive.
I think this could pose a problem for truly awful jobs like at slaughterhouses, because nobody would be desperate.
>I think this could pose a problem for truly awful jobs like at slaughterhouses, because nobody would be desperate.
I think this would pose a great solution for awful jobs: in order to attract workers you'd have to dramatically improve your working conditions.
Take Amazon's practice of hiring temps to work in their warehouses - Amazon might have to pay to introduce air conditioning and heating to their stockrooms, give their employees actual breaks, raise wages, etc.
Alternatively they'd invest more heavily in automation to replace employees, driving technological innovation while not displacing human labor.
> I think this could pose a problem for truly awful jobs like at slaughterhouses, because nobody would be desperate.
It might drive up the price of meat until you could pay people enough to work in a slaughterhouse (or make it cost effective to automate them), but is that a bad thing?
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but if it's anything like the Mincome Experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome) then it means you get $2800 unconditionally, but a $1200 a month job comes out of it.
The way these programs are paid for is because most people would be making more than $2800 a month anyway, so their net cost to the government is zero.
Mincome != Basic Income. Under Basic Income, everyone gets a fixed amount unconditionally. Any extra income you get on top of that is yours to keep. So you get the $2800 from the government, then get a job for that $1200 (from the grandparent's example), so now you have $4000 in total.
Mincome worked differently from this, but the OP talks about Basic Income, which just gives a fixed amount to everyone.
Actually, now that I'm doing more reading, things can be a bit more confusing.
There are a few approaches to solve this problem - in some cases a negative income tax is applied, and in others the government actually issues a 'citizens dividend'.
Neither case necessarily mandates a 1:1 decrease in benefit as your other income sources go up. It all depends on how things are structured... someone with a significant monthly income could have a high enough tax as to effectively remove the base payment, where a particularly poor worker may not lose any.
And unfortunately I don't speak enough French to read the petition, and none of the sources in English I can find actually spell out the details.
Then we will have to pay more than $2800 per month (or the job simply won't get done, which isn't necessarily a bad thing).