I'd like to believe this is true, but it's both counter-intuitive and counter to my actual lived experience the last couple of years.
I'm not sure how it's going down in other countries, but in Canada we've had an unintentional experiment with this due to the pandemic. Our economic relief package allows people to collect government insurance if they're out of work due to Covid. But unlike traditional employment insurance, everyone gets the same amount, and that amount turns out to be more than you could make working full-time at minimum wage.
Now, full disclosure, I'm unabashedly socialist in my leanings. I want UBI to work. I also don't believe that a person's value should be determined by their output. So I'm the last person to be against Basic Income.
However, we have to look at the results. And the results in Canada are that it's almost impossible to hire enough people to work those entry-level roles anymore:
- In my home city of Sudbury, the school bus companies are now offering a $2k signing bonus plus several dollars above minimum wage to attract drivers. They still can't get enough drivers and we're dealing with rolling daily bus cancellations as a result.
- As a hiring manager myself, I've found that jobs that used to get an abundance of high-quality applicants are now getting almost no qualified applicants at all. We're offering starting wages that are, in many cases, $20k more per year than they were a decade ago, and $10k more than they were 2 years ago. This is in a market where the average household income is well under $50k.
- Unemployment rates are higher than they've been in a long time despite the fact that job vacancies are higher than they've ever been.
Now, we can argue back and forth about whether the above is an acceptable trade-off for all the benefits of UBI. But my experience very much suggests that basic income does indeed reduce people's willingness to work.