The Digital Age Reimagined Work. It’s Time to Reimagine Benefits.

Expanded, portable benefits are needed for today’s workforce

At a certain point you have to admit that the future of work isn’t in the future anymore. It’s here.

More than one out of three U.S. workers earn money from gig work. Nearly one out five rely on gig work as their main source of income. And a fifth of the U.S. workforce is expected to stay remote after the pandemic.

The future of work has arrived. So why are benefits stuck in the past?

More than two-thirds of Americans see our health care system as badly broken. Our retirement system is failing. We’re the only industrialized country without paid family medical leave. The benefits in this country aren’t just outdated — they’re a tattered quilt that someone has actively cut a few squares out of.

A Tattered Patchwork Quilt

These failures relate partly to how our health care system, retirement system, paid leave, and other public policies came into being. Over the last century, lawmakers and economic realities have stitched together the disjointed patchwork of benefits we’re familiar with today.

Take health care for example. During World War II, the federal government froze wages and U.S. companies started offering health care as an additional perk to attract more workers. The benefit stuck, and today the U.S. is one of the only countries in the industrial world that ties access to health care to your employer.

Since WWII, our country has patched together Medicare, Medicaid, Medicare Part D, Obamacare, and a handful of other fixes. The result? Millions of Americans still can’t afford health care and the system is difficult or impossible to navigate for those who can.

The same patchwork approach has left our retirement system and our child care system threadbare.

New Benefits for Changing Work

That brings us to our current moment, in which lawmakers are eyeing another hole in the quilt, one left by a changing economy and workforce. With 30 million workers relying on non-traditional work — and a range of critical benefits tied to traditional work — a substantial number of U.S. workers aren’t getting the benefits they need.

To address the issue, policymakers are considering ideas like reclassifying independent contractors as permanent employees. But changes like this would create new issues.

Part of the reason that gig work is attractive to so many Americans is because of the flexibility that comes with it, a benefit that would likely disappear with reclassification under our existing system. More patches, more problems.

What if, rather than another patch to health care benefits, retirement benefits, and child care, what if we created a whole new blanket? This one wouldn’t be a jumble of short-term fixes. Instead, we would design an expanded set of benefits that cover all Americans.

I’m talking about universal health care coverage, portable benefits for retirement and workers comp, expanded unemployment insurance, humane paid leave policies, and universal child care. We need good benefits that cover everyone, not just people working the right jobs in the right sector.

For example, many employees of big tech companies have for years enjoyed generous paid leave policies (I benefited from three separate paternity leaves while at Google). But paid leave shouldn’t only be accessible to employees of rich companies; it should be an expanded, government-funded benefit available to McDonalds shift workers and house cleaners too.

Expanded, Flexible Benefits

I would call these ideas revolutionary, but our country has been discussing them for more than half a century. And concepts like portable benefits are already working in cities like New York.

Part of the solution should also be rethinking — and reclassifying — how we label workers in our country. It’s clear that gig work has created a new type of employment, one that doesn’t fit into the standard full-time employee and contractor categories that defined the last century of work. Rather than trying to make a 21st century workplace fit into a 20th century paradigm, we should create a new category of employment for gig workers, ensuring these employees receive the pay they deserve and keep the hours they enjoy.

In the digital age, we’ve successfully reimagined work. This is our moment to reimagine benefits in the same way, expanding access and enabling flexibility.

Right now, policymakers are stuck looking for a patch to address a changed economy. But the problem policymakers should be looking at isn’t the new economy, it’s the fact that 46 million Americans still can’t afford needed care, half of Americans are at risk of not being able to maintain their standard of living in retirement, and the child care crisis is keeping millions of parents out of the workforce. Those are problems that will require us to think bigger than a quick fix.

Services like health care, child care, paid leave, and a retirement plan shouldn’t be “work benefits.” These should be rights that every American gets regardless of their career. The future of work is here, and it’s already taken shape. Let’s think about what we want the future of benefits to look like.

The Chamber of Progress (progresschamber.org) is a new center-left tech industry policy coalition promoting technology’s progressive future. We work to ensure that all Americans benefit from technological leaps, and that the tech industry operates responsibly and fairly.

Our work is supported by our corporate partners, but our partners do not sit on our board of directors and do not have a vote on or veto over our positions. We do not speak for individual partner companies and remain true to our stated principles even when our partners disagree.