When you stop to think about it, our labor market is broken for work no one wants to do. When it comes to pricing for a job with low demand, employers should have to do more to make that job attractive. That should involve higher pay, better hours, better benefits, better conditions, etc. The fact those jobs tend to pay the least, shows that there is no free market for labor. People are doing those jobs because they have no ability to refuse them.
This is also bad for productivity and automation. Basically, humans are competing against each other, bidding down their wages to make their labor cheaper than robots, because they need the money to live. Thus, the cost of labor is below what it should be, preventing greater rates of automation.
We want robots to do the machines we don't want to do. If people ask too much to do an unwanted job, that makes automating that job that much more attractive.
I cover all of this some more here: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/why-we-should-all-have-a-basic-income
Good point, forgot about automation. Robots are probably the answer.
Automation and AI, in my mind, is the primary reason for discussing a UBI in the first place. Won't take long before machine learning takes a good portion of information-based jobs away.