Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

During his 2016 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama asserted that “Basic benefits should be just as mobile as everything else is today.” With a keen eye towards the changing nature of work in the 21^st century, Obama understood that the prototypical model of benefit structures – i.e. those housed within a company – no longer work when workers are so often unmoored from any company structure. Workers today are lyft drivers, task rabbiters, home health care aides, and freelance consultants, with work arrangements as varied as the jobs themselves. In this context, worker benefits often offered by a company, e.g. paid sick and safe time, worker’s comp, retirement plans, are precluded from non-classified employees. This means that a vast and growing portion of American workers are left without access to the basic security that most benefits provide. As Obama alluded to, one possible solution to this lies in “portable benefits” – those tied to the worker, not the company, thereby allowing a benefit structure to follow workers wherever their work brings them.

Following this State of the Union declaration, two bills (House and Senate) were brought to Congress in 2017 to create a $20 million fund that would support state and local government’s “experiments” with portable benefit structures. While both federal bills died in committee, there seems to be promising policy movement at the state and local level. Most notably, Washington State introduced HB 2821 in January of this year. If passed, it requires companies that offer services to consumers to make contributions to non-profit benefit providers for their workers taxed under 1099 status. These contributions would provide worker’s compensation, as well as a range of other benefits that are determined by the provider with input from the workers themselves. In July, Seattle passed the Seattle Domestic Workers Ordinance, which not only guaranteed core labor standards for domestic workers, but also established a wage board that will convene in 2019. Among this board’s mandates is the consideration of portable benefits that grant access for domestic workers to a suite of benefits. Finally, a bill was brought to the New York City Council in August that would require the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) to create a benefits program for taxi and for-hire vehicle drivers. Paid for by a surcharge on fares, the benefits would include health care services and disability insurance.

In this paper, I will survey this nascent policy movement by conducting a textual analysis of the legislation, committee hearing recordings, council meeting notes, text of the proposed bills, and administrative rules of the passed ordinance. This is part of a larger project, in which I am conducting fieldwork at three sites of non-profit portable benefits: the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance, the Black Car Fund, and the Freelancer’s Union. The aim is for this exploration of policy to inform my understanding of the successes and failures of these three cases, working towards a dissertation that delivers a clear policy recommendation for the future of portable benefits.