Salary for Life

= The Salaire A Vie is a proposal central to the work of Bernard Friot (book: L'Emancipation du Travail) and his associates in the Reseau Salariat, a French movement that is very critical of the Basic Income; it proposes a salary that is not determined by market forces;

Discussion

Xavier from BlaqSwans with Céline Trefle:

"We were just discussing with Céline Trefle the clash (I think we can call it this way given the intensity of some exchanges) between the supporters of Bernard Friot and his Salary for Life, and those supporting an Unconditional Universal Income. In the French context that is.

We are not experts in Bernard Friot’s entire body of work so there is always a possibility that one of his supporters might say we haven’t understood it, HOWEVER, from what we see from their own sources:

=> On the quantitative front (the numbers): he’s promoting a 2,500 euro salary per month for anyone above 18 yo. That’s 50 million people in France. So x12 months, that would be 1,500 billion euros per year. The French GDP is 2,085 billion euro (yes we all agree GDP is a very unsatisfactory measure but let’s use it just to grasp what we’re talking about). That means that the Salary for Live would represent 71.9% of the French GDP, which is pretty massive given you’d still need to pay for the rest (Infrastructure, etc)

To give an order of magnitude, in 2016 the taxes and levies (prélèvements obligatoires = impots + cotisations sociales) represent 44.5% of GDP. Another measure: the public debt is 96% of GDP. So really, 71.9% is an extraordinary level.

So we’ve been wondering with what logic you could possibly make this number feasible. I think what Friot is looking at is the wage share as % of GDP, which depending of the sources gravitates between 50% and 60-70% (see picture here). He must then say that ALL of those wages get converted into a Salary of Life. That would be the only way to reach his 71.9%. So that would literally have to mop out any ‘private’ or ‘individual’ salary outside of that system.

=> Then the ensuing question is on the qualitative front: how to deliver this? Friot’s project is to set-up a centralised “caisse de salaire” – a central bureau managing the wages fund – administered by the State (not really a P2P thing) that would decide your level of qualification (on scale of 1 to 4) which would determine your salary somewhere between 1,700e and 6,000e. That determination would be done by the central office (again not really a P2P thing...) (source: http://www.reseau-salariat.info/d60e8d6f2500d2a81466e1d205be9c59?lang=fr )

The same document from Reseau-Salariat says "Comme le salaire à vie se double de l’interdiction de la propriété lucrative et de la généralisation de la copropriété d’usage des entreprises et services publics par les salariés, le producteur est aussi libéré du chantage de l’actionnaire ou du prêteur." That is pretty full-on: what does "banning lucrative property" mean? That I could not rent my flat? That I could not get hired for a contract to earn extra money?

As much as we really genuinely think we need people like Bernard Friot to stimulate the debate, the thinking, and push the envelop (genuinely meaning it: there's so much violence on the capitalist side, we need to unapologetically counter it with punch and chutzpah), some paragraphs in the text his Reseau-Salariat published really sound like a dystopian revival of the worst aspects of East-Germany and USSR. I'm sure (or hope) they don't mean it, but seriously... history shows human nature has had a terrible tendency to deliver this type of outcome when going that way... " (Facebook, May 2016)