Sara Horowitz is the founder of the Freelancers Union, and has a vision for an enlarged role for mutualist organizations, as typified by worker’s collectives, unions, and other non-governmental actors. But her aversion to a larger role for government in the shifting economics of the postnormal world is misplaced.
Here’s how she sets the context in a recent NY Times piece:
Sara Horowitz, Help for the Way We Work Now
The freelance economy is more than a new frontier in old partisan battles over workers’ rights and government regulation. Freelancers, a rapidly expanding share of the electorate, have become a legitimate political constituency, and nobody is effectively speaking up for their needs.
Mrs. Clinton and the Democratic Party as a whole certainly have a much better track record on labor rights than their Republican opponents. Yet, while it’s clear that misclassified work is a serious problem that warrants punishment for bad actors, treating freelancers as employees will not solve all of our problems.
In the freelance economy, workers inevitably face periods without pay. But unemployment benefits are not available to most freelancers, so they have virtually no safety net. Even when they are working, freelancers don’t enjoy the essential health care and retirement benefits associated with salaried employment. While the Affordable Care Act is helping freelancers with lower incomes gain access to insurance, some who do not qualify for subsidies are struggling to cope with rising health care costs. And it’s nearly impossible for many freelancers to plan for retirement when they are forced to dip into their savings during periods between jobs.
In response, we should develop a new system of portable benefits that reflects the realities of episodic income. Specifically, freelancers should be allowed to put away pretax income into shared accounts, where clients would also make prorated contributions based on the number of hours worked.
This portable benefits system would be a new program, but it would not be another government entitlement. Instead, it would be administered by unions, nonprofits, faith-based groups and other community organizations that would collect payments and distribute benefits when freelancers needed them.
Something goes off the tracks, here.
- Horowitz starts strong: freelancers are disenfranchised, in essence, and the Democrats are at least looking at work misclassification as a serious issue.
- She then states that solving misclassification won’t solve all the problems freelancers face. Hold on, though: it would solve the problem of misclassification, right? Yes there are other problems, like portability of benefits, but misclassification also needs to be fixed.
- Then, she sketches out a portable benefits plan in the abstract – ok, great – but then pronounces – with no preamble or explanation – that it wouldn’t be ‘another government entitlement’. Wait, hold on. Why would this not be another government program, like social security and the National Labor Relations Act? Why is it going to be administered by ‘faith-based groups’ and ‘non-profits’? Why move the rights of the fastest growing class of American workers to the margins? Is she a crypto-libertarian?
Or, to restate that question, why is Sara Horowitz giving up on the classic model of American civil rights, which is to pass federal laws and to reinterpret the constitution so that unequal treatment of some minority is made illegal? Perhaps she’s lost faith with the liberals, or believes that extra-governmental approaches are more likely to succeed.
But I reject those arguments, personally. I hope that Clinton and the Democrats make the rights of a growing class of disenfranchised workers – the part-timers, the temps, the freelancers – a major part of their platform.
Horowitz goes only half way to where we need to be, while Clinton is maybe two thirds. We need misclassification fixed, we need a new classification for ‘dependent contractors’, and we need portable and employer-supported benefits. Building that into existing labor law and federal tax and worker regulation is the right long-term solution. It’s good policy and good politics.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/128550483492
