Fair Reciprocity

= Shifting from ‘what they owe us’ to ‘what we owe each other’.

Source

More excerpts and background at:

* Article: The Left and Reciprocity. By Stuart White. From: Labour's Future. Soundings Journal & Open Left. Lawrence Wishart, 2010

URL = http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/ebooks/Labour%27s%20Future%20(Final).pdf

Discussion

Stuart White:

"To expand the conversation in this way, we need to put the whole issue of work and contribution in a framework which does take in the wider economic system, developing an account of what I have elsewhere called fair reciprocity. This sounds rather abstract, but here are some guiding principles:

No poverty in work

If work is a condition of a decent income, then a decent income ought to be the guaranteed outcome of a decent minimum of work. Moreover, poverty is a matter of limited time as well as limited income: someone has not really escaped poverty if she has to work, say, sixty hours a week for a minimally decent income.8 As a society we need to decide how much paid work we can reasonably expect of different types of household (e.g., two- and one-parent families) and then make sure that any household providing this has an adequate income.

Quality of work

While every citizen has an obligation to contribute productively, no citizen is obliged to convert their life into drudgery. Thus, those who are willing to make a decent productive contribution should have adequate opportunities for fulfilment in work.

Tackling undeserved high incomes and wealth

Ethical socialists like Tawney understood that the welfare system is by no means the only way individuals can get ‘something for nothing’, violating reciprocity. They can also get something for nothing by being paid in excess of their genuine contribution to production or by living off returns to unearned wealth. To apply the norm of reciprocity consistently therefore requires that society scrutinise rewards at the top and take action to share unearned appreciations in wealth. (Consider, for example, the way in which many households have benefited from a huge rise in land values in recent years, getting richer with no extra effort while others have been excluded from the housing market as a result of this very same process.)

Acknowledging all forms of contribution

In much of this discussion, we have used words like ‘work’ and ‘contribution’ interchangeably. But this is potentially misleading. Contribution shouldn’t be equated with employment. Carers, for example, also make a very valuable contribution, even when their care work is not in the formal economy, and popular attitudes seem to acknowledge this. Any public account of our duties to contribute must take account of the full range of ways in which people make productive contributions to their society, e.g. as carers and parents as well as employees.

The risk with the new interest in reciprocity is that it becomes little more than a new way of articulating the New Labour agenda of ‘rights and responsibilities’, an agenda which has clear limitations in terms of social justice. If the left is to move beyond this agenda, to a genuinely egalitarian politics, the notion of reciprocity needs to be deepened and enriched in something like this way." (http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/ebooks/Labour%27s%20Future%20(Final).pdf)

More Information

• Stuart White, The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic

Citizenship, Oxford University Press 2003.