January 24th (Sunday) – Coordinations for a Global May Day 2021

This meeting will focus on the creation of a common framework:
We want to discuss the proposal submitted by FOB focussing on a universal basic income (copied below) as well as other points that should be included in a common call.

Everyone sympathizing with the Global May Day self-conception is invited to join the meeting!

Suggested Agenda:

• Round of introduction
• Introducing framework of 2020
• Discussing proposal by FOB (universal basic income)
• Collecting other points for a common call
• Next steps

Feel free to communicate any proposals for changes to the agenda ahead of the meeting.

How to join the meeting

January 24th (Sunday) — 11am EST, 4pm UTC, 5pm CET, 8:30pm IST
!! this time converter can help you find out what time 4pm UTC will be at your location !!

Chatroom: tlk.io/1world1struggle

You can enter any name (preferably incl. your location – or login with your twitter/fb account).
You can access the chatroom on your computer, tablet or smartphone. NO webcam or microphone needed.

Event page on facebook

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FOB (Brazil) proposes to support this concept of a Universal Basic Income as part of the call for Global May Day 2021:

What is Universal Basic Income?

The Universal Basic Income is a minimum income that every worker should be entitled to receive for the simple fact of existing. Unlike salary, which is paid by the employer to his employees, the Universal Basic Income is paid by the State to each and every worker regardless of whether or not he is employed.

Universal Basic Income and the end of the Welfare State

Worldwide, but especially in peripheral countries, capitalism has produced a large mass of marginalized workers who have a precarious insertion in the labor market.
These workers are either unemployed, or work informally, or oscillate between employment and unemployment, not having a fixed income and often earning less than a minimum wage.
In recent decades, with productive restructuring and the advance of neoliberalism, the precariousness of labor has become greater and greater worldwide, placing workers who were better inserted into the labor market in conditions of greater insecurity and without guarantees of a fixed and minimum wage.
Unlike the post-World War II world, which produced full employment societies, today’s capitalism is advancing globally toward the systematic production of millions of unemployed and, at the same time, a deterioration of the jobs produced.

The technological advance itself, with the development of artificial intelligence, in a society like this, will produce in the coming years not only the end of millions of job vacancies but also indicates that the bourgeoisie will not need a large part of the mass of the world’s population, not even as labor.
Thus, with the end of the welfare state, full employment, and the precariousness of jobs, the struggle for a universal basic income tends to become the new struggle for a minimum wage.

The state unions, characteristic of Fordist society, lock in a corporate agenda that leaves out the large masses of marginalized workers who do not even have bosses and wages. The struggle for a universal basic income is a struggle that unifies the entire working class, employed, unemployed, formal and informal.

The Pandemic and the Need for a Universal Basic Income

The Covid-19 Pandemic was quite significant to show this reality.

On the one hand, it became evident that the need to paralyze work and make social isolation was impossible for a large part of the workers, especially the informal ones.
The right to a basic income is also the right to paralyze work for the protection of workers’ health.

On the other hand, the establishment of emergency aid in Brazil, for example, led workers to organize themselves into whatsapp and facebook networks, both to help themselves with information on how to receive the aid and a movement to demand that emergency aid not be decreased or cut.

This demonstrated that workers are willing to fight for a basic income and are able to organize themselves for this struggle that unifies the working class.

The establishment of universal basic income as a right of workers goes beyond the policy of voter income transfer, since this transfer is no longer considered by the worker a benefit given by a president, mayor or governor.