Lydia DePillis has a great summary of the groundswell of support growing for portable benefits for on demand workers.
On Tuesday, a letter surfaced calling for a new social safety net regime that could allow people to move easily from gig to gig without losing the benefits and protections usually contained within the traditional employment relationship. Right now, companies say, it’s difficult for them to offer employment-like perks without running the risk of getting hit with lawsuits.
The missive was signed by a long list of people ranging from the chief executives of Etsy and Lyft to activists for guest workers and home care aides— a disparate group, to be sure. But it also reflects the coalescence of views on one side of a policy debate that has divided the left: The question of whether companies should be allowed to classify workers as something between regular employees and independent contractors, or whether doing so would allow employers to evade responsibility by pushing people who should really be employees into a middle category with fewer protections and benefits.
“Most people still get their benefits through their employers,” says David Madland, director of the American Worker project at the Center for American Progress, who knew about but didn’t sign the letter. “How do we design it so all workers, regardless what their classification is, get good benefits, without undermining what other workers get? That’s where the difficulty would come in.”
Momentum building for change
The group got its start in San Francisco in July, where McKinsey Global Institute co-founder Lenny Mendonca — who has retired to a life of sitting on boards and dabbling in politics — had been convening groups of people to talk about public policy solutions to various problems. The letter came together after a second meeting in September, with the help of people like Natalie Foster, a fellow at the research organization Institute for the Future and Greg Nelson, a senior advisor to President Obama at the National Economic Council.
What they arrived at is basically a statement of principles: That new, flexible work arrangements are a good thing and should be supported by public policy, that workers should have access to a set of benefits that travel with them from job to job, and that companies should be able to “experiment” with different benefits arrangements — without fear of getting sued for treating employees like independent contractors.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/134858003442
