UBI Dressed Like Work
Madonna Demir reveals how subsidies and make-work jobs hide a shadow basic-income system already shaping modern employment.
Not a dystopian future. Today’s payroll theater.
Since the modern universal basic income (UBI) debate broke into public consciousness, UBI has often been framed as a distant future: a stipend, a safety net, a radical shift in how we relate to work. “UBI is coming as AI replaces workers,” the pundits say. But what if that narrative misunderstands our present? What if UBI is already here, disguised in the everyday employment routines we accept as normal?
This is not theoretical. It is already baked into the way governments, corporations, and labor systems operate.
Joe Normal — a UBI Vision
Joe wakes up as the noon sun brightens the sky. He texts a few buddies, “hoops? 2 pm! b-ball court at the park.”
After the game, Joe returns home to shower. He orders food delivery, set to arrive afterward. Then, food in hand, he settles in to scroll on his phone and watch last night’s game on TV.
Ahh, how Joe loves life under UBI. He is living the dream, just kicking back and enjoying life while receiving a healthy check each month into his bank account. Nice to have robots and AI doing all the work!
Folks conjure up this Joe Normal vision in the public UBI discourse. That’s not how it’s structured. In reality, UBI wears overalls and Joe Normal packs a lunch bucket.
The Hidden Architecture of Make‑Work
Local Content Mandates and Subsidized Employment
In my work at large corporations, we planned countries of distribution for each product. Would we need a factory in the planned market? It would depend. Around the world, governments use local-content requirements (LCRs) to force or incentivize firms to perform a certain percentage of production, assembly, or value-added work locally.
These policies are intended to create jobs to ensure a domestic labor base rather than letting fully built goods be imported. In effect, governments say: Yes, your company may access our markets, but only if you generate domestic labor. Employ our folks, give them decent wages for final product assembly, and you may have market access.
Sometimes the requirement is explicit (“35% of content must be local”), sometimes more nuanced. Over time, these mandates distort economics. They reduce pure efficiency but secure employment, ensuring the local citizenry has gainful work. In one example, we received fully assembled goods from one country, disassembled them into subassemblies in another, just to access a market where the subassemblies would be reassembled with local labor. This exemplified the very definition of make-work, though local workers sincerely believed they were adding value.
From a business perspective, one could argue this is “state intervention in industrial policy.” Quite often, the hidden effect is to underwrite jobs that would not otherwise exist, because the profit-maximizing route would have been to import finished goods or fully automate. This is, in other words, subsidized make-work.
Subsidies, Route Guarantees, and Strategic Losses
Beyond manufacturing, governments often subsidize unprofitable routes or industries for political or social reasons. In the airline sector, rural or low-demand routes are often kept alive by government payments or guarantees, without sufficient traffic to justify them. Every empty seat represents a small economic loss, but these subsidies preserve local employment.
For instance, the U.S. Essential Air Service program pays hundreds of millions annually to keep small-town airports connected, ensuring jobs for ground staff, maintenance crews, and local hospitality networks. In other countries, similar programs underwrite air traffic or rail routes to preserve regional access and employment.
In another example, Argentina’s energy sector has long had nominal LCR requirements for local employment, sustaining payrolls where pure market logic would not. These are social stability measures, but they function as covert income guarantees, economic bridges, and make-work masked as industrial necessity.
On a corporate level, firms accept over-staffing in exchange for tax breaks or government incentives. I’ve seen corporate department layers staffed one-hundred-fold beyond what was needed to accomplish results, just to meet political promises or merit passing of minimum threshold tests for tax relief and wage rebates.
Combined, these two strategies—forced domestic labor content plus subsidies—mean that many workers are, in effect, paid by the public purse, though filtered and mediated through ostensibly private employers.
When “Necessary Jobs” Become UBI in Disguise
To me, this is a structural form of universal basic income. The government could, in theory, simply mail checks to citizens and let them stay home. But that option comes with risks. Politicians fear public unrest, social pressure, and political backlash from having too many citizens with time on their hands. Instead, the system does something subtler: it funnels public funds into jobs that exist by virtue of policy rather than necessity, giving people paychecks with the side benefit of keeping the economy busy and dependent on itself.
Case Study — Protecting the Illusion of Work
Across advanced economies, courts and corporations sometimes step in to protect the illusion of work. In one recent European case, a man who secretly held three full‑time jobs was ordered to return his salary.
The system didn’t punish him for overreaching or for being too efficient in getting three times the normal work product completed; it punished him for refusing to play his part. Even if he could complete one job in a third of the time, he was expected to leave the other two roles available for separate actors, appeasing three citizens instead of one.
His real transgression wasn’t efficiency. It was breaking the social contract of the employment theater: the unspoken rule that every seat must placate a separate citizen, even when the work no longer requires it.
He violated the choreography of make‑work theater.
When Work Becomes Identity
Enter “bullshit jobs,” the concept developed by anthropologist David Graeber. In his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, he argues that a large portion of modern employment is pointless; the person doing it secretly believes the job need not exist.
Graeber writes, “We have become a civilization based on work—not even productive work but work as an end and meaning in itself.”
In short, many jobs today exist because someone somewhere made a political or bureaucratic decision to preserve employment, not because the underlying economic function truly demands them. We are over‑staffed by design. In effect, we’re living UBI through employment theater.
Why We Don’t See It (Even When We Live in It)
Cognitive Framing and the Work Ethic
We’re culturally conditioned to believe in the moral virtue of work. To ask, “Are all these jobs really necessary?” feels like sacrilege. Work is identity. So if someone says a job is “unnecessary,” it feels like a judgment on the person, not the system.
Graeber also lamented a deeper spiritual harm: “Bullshit jobs regularly induce feelings of hopelessness, depression, and self‑loathing. They are forms of spiritual violence directed at the essence of what it means to be a human being.”
We are feeling this already. Apathy and disconnection to purpose show up in engagement surveys. People often know make‑work when they are assigned to it.
The Automation Fallacy and Deferred Transition
Another barrier to seeing the phenomenon clearly is our fixation on automation. The common narrative is: first robots will take over, then jobs will vanish, and finally at some imaginary end, we’ll be left with UBI or chaos.
But that framing misses a key structural truth. We already have far more automation and AI capability than we let into the story.
Sometimes, instead of fully automating and cutting people out, the system creates jobs around the edges—roles of coordination, reporting, oversight, and compliance. We sustain the labor illusion while narrowing real productivity gains.
What This Means Going Forward
In my view, UBI doesn’t arrive “someday” as a sudden policy change. It is here now, hiding in plain sight via workfare disguised as employment and public funds funneled into unnecessary jobs.
So no, we will not see a clean transition to “everyone gets a check and stays home.” That’s politically dangerous.
My prediction? Today’s version of make‑work UBI will continue and accelerate, because although we have the ability to automate more—to outsource to AI or robotics—today’s make‑work UBI will be an equal and opposite force pulling to preserve our way of life: clock in, do the work, get a paycheck.
Today’s payroll theater is the UBI we had forecast.
Diagnosing the Illusion: Questions to Ask
Bullshit Job or UBI?
• Who benefits from the job’s existence? If this job disappeared, would results collapse?
• Are there digital tools or AI that duplicate this work silently?
• If headcount were reduced, would political or subsidy penalties kick in?
Risks and Resistance
• Morale and mental health suffer when people realize they are in pointless roles.
• Political blowback ensures employers and governments resist cuts.
• Inequality deepens as some skills remain highly rewarded (real jobs) while others drift into subsidized make‑work.
• Innovation stagnates when too much energy maintains jobs instead of reinventing them.
Conclusion
We are not waiting for UBI. We live under its shadow system already. What we call “jobs” are increasingly the filter through which public incomes are distributed. What we call “work” is sometimes payroll theater.
If we don’t name it, we can’t wrestle it. The next time you see a department bloated beyond reason, a local‑content rule behind a factory, or a subsidy underwriting employment, remember: you are witnessing UBI in disguise.
— Madonna Demir, author of Systems & Soul
Madonna Demir
If you enjoyed reading this, also visit The Vanishing Art of Whistling
