This week we’re opening up a symposium on universal basic income (UBI). UBI is both an important topic in its own right and a useful lens for examining recurrent virtues and vices in projects of partial decommodification and universal provision. This post situates the discussion.

Here at the Blog we’re trying out a new idea: inviting a rotating pair of “Guest Editors” to help steer our editorial process. Guest Editors will join our editorial board (scroll down) for six months at a time. Our first Guest Editors are Angela Harris, Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Davis, and Noah Zatz, Professor of Law at UCLA. In this post they introduce their goals.

Two pandemic policy stories have been coming to a head: (1) the push for another relief bill as a key CARES Act unemployment insurance benefit expires on July 31, and (2) the ongoing national child-care crisis as school closures for the fall are announced amidst the virus’ resurgence. What connects them is kids’ needs for care and families’ needs for economic support when they—predominantly mothers, of course—perform that caring labor. A little-noticed feature of the CARES Act supports care for children who must stay home due to school closures.

Today, as part of our ongoing effort to bring you the best LPE work on COVID-19, we're reposting a letter from Professor Noah Zatz to his City Counsel regarding evictions during the pandemic.

Focusing on universalizing access to better paid work submerges two other longstanding elements of critical feminist analysis of care work. These are particularly pertinent to LPE conversations about the political-economic centrality of markets. First, feminist accounts of social reproduction have long highlighted the extensive, essential, but systematically devalued or outright ignored work performed outside conventional labor markets in families and communities. This includes especially direct care work and housework or other household production, but also broader forms of civic participation often denoted “volunteering.” Second, attaching economic resources to nonmarket social reproductive labor starts to loosen paid work’s iron grip on household income more generally. That grip creates a legitimated dependency on labor markets that undergirds power relations both between labor and capital and, within families, between market “breadwinners” and those more conventionally labelled “dependents.” Valuing care thus could facilitate both reimagining work and decentering markets.

Noah Zatz on what a 1L Contracts course might look like from a law and political economy perspective.