Here’s One Way America’s Many ‘Pro-Worker’ Candidates Can Deliver
Even during a contentious election year, plenty of Democrats and Republicans agree on something: With millions of Americans earning money on freelance and gig platforms, it’s time to focus on innovative ideas to better incorporate this growing self-employed workforce.
Portable benefits — those tied to a worker rather than an employer — are rapidly moving to the top of a bipartisan agenda.
In fact, the next president and Congress, no matter who that happens to be, will have a realistic early opportunity to help a lot of workers.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) made headlines over the summer for his interest in portable benefits reforms. Earlier, in April, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing on the idea. Some members of Congress have even introduced a bipartisan bill on a portable benefits pilot program. At the same time, there is unprecedented momentum at the state level, including in Utah and Pennsylvania.
The core idea inspiring these reforms is the realization that our current policies force workers to choose between self-employment on one hand and access to common workplace benefits on the other.
Half a century ago — long before anyone could line up self-employment with a few clicks of a mouse — tax incentives were created to encourage our fringe benefits to be tied to traditional W-2 employment jobs. This unintentional policy now feeds into labor laws that restrict the flow of benefits to non-traditional workers. For a long time, this was not a big issue because most workers were traditional employees. But now that circumstances have changed, our laws are failing a large and growing sector of the workforce.
This does not have to be the case. Federal policymakers can equalize tax treatment between self-employed and payroll workers, create opportunities for flexible benefits and savings, and improve self-employed workers’ access to health-care benefits.