The big idea buried in Obama’s speech
Many of the ideas in the State of the Union are policies that President Obama has visited throughout his presidency. But hidden in his speech was one big new idea about the future of work: portable benefits.
“And for Americans short of retirement, basic benefits should be just as mobile as everything else is today. That’s what the Affordable Care Act is all about.”
Over the last century, we built a social safety net for people who worked one job for 30 years. We set up a system where the employers would be responsible for supporting the benefits and protections like health care, workers compensation, unemployment insurance, retirement savings and paid time off.
But as President Obama pointed out, that world no longer exists:
The Affordable Care Act offers one model for providing independent workers a different avenue of access to health insurance. You can keep your health care even as you change jobs. In an economy where work looks very different, this flexibility makes sense.
But it’s not just health care. Retirement savings and many other employer-provided benefits and protections get more and more complicated (and inefficient for the the worker) when the workers adds more income streams. Can we apply the same principles of flexibility and stability to other benefits and protections for workers, regardless if they have one job or several gigs? Can we build a system that supports people who work, even as they move from job to job, or gig to gig?
That’s what the growing conversation around “portable benefits” is all about.
The rise of the gig economy is prompting a closer look at how we deliver protections and benefits — and while that’s important, the question is much larger than just Uber drivers and Etsy sellers. And the President’s speech reflects that:
And even if he’s going from job to job, he should still be able to save for retirement and take his savings with him. That’s the way we make the new economy work better for everyone.
President Obama isn’t the only one who thinks this idea is exciting. Labor leaders like SEIU’s David Rolf and Freelancers Union’s Sara Horowitz; company executives like Lyft’s Logan Green and Care.com’s Sheila Marcelo; venture capitalists like Greylock’s Simon Rothman and Homebrew’s Satya Patel have all voiced support for this idea. And the list continues to grow.
In December, many of these people joined Senator Mark Warner and Labor Secretary Tom Perez at the Aspen Institute to discuss design principles for such a system of portable benefits.
In the aftermath of the President’s State of the Union, pundits are dissecting and debating a variety of big, important themes. But with just a few words in his discussion of the economy, the President created room for an idea that has the power to transform our economy: a vision for remaking a new, flexible social safety net for a new kind of work — one that could make the economy work better for all.
