BASEL (NNA) – The Swiss initiative calling for an unconditional basic income has overcome its first hurdle to have the measure introduced into law. One hundred thousand signatures were needed by October for parliament to debate the issue but by early August 130,000 signatures had been collected, the initiative said on its website. The signatures will be handed over to the Swiss parliament in October.

The popular initiative for an unconditional basic income (UBI), which in the view of its supporters should be thought of as a civil right rather than social wefare, was launched in 2012. It aims to have a new clause incorporated into the Swiss constitution that the Confederation “shall ensure the introduction of an unconditional basic income. The basic income shall enable the whole population to live in human dignity and participate in public life. The law shall particularly regulate the way in which the basic income is to be financed and the level at which it is set.”

The UBI was the subject of a conference in March at the Goetheanum in Dornach attended by 200 people. One of the speakers was the entrepreneur and founder of the dm chaim of pharmacies, Götz Werner, who has been a strong proponent of UBI in Germany. Werner said that the success of the Swiss initiative could have model character for the whole of Europe.

The German alternative newspaper taz commented that no petition in Switzerland had ever collected so many signatures in such a short period of time. The UBI initiative had broken all records in comparison with the previous 420 nationwide popular initiatives.

taz sees one reason for the high level of support as being that, according to OECD statistics, Switzerland is one of the three states in which social inequality has grown the most in the last 20 years. Furthermore, the intiative in Switzerland – other than in Germany – had set itself in the political context of other campaigns protesting against the consequences of neoliberal economic policies such as the referendum leading to much greater restrictions on lavish executive pay packages or an initiative supported by the trade unions and churches for a national minimum wage (taz 27/28 July, p.12)

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Item: 130807-01EN Date: 7 August 2013

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