Building a 21st Century Safety Net

This article from Derek Thompson in the Atlantic is one of the best summations that we’ve seen of how the social safety net—designed to solve the problems of an industrial economy of the 1940s and 1950s—hasn’t kept pace with how we work today. We’ve been talking about how the freelance economy is getting largely ignored by people who count workers, leading to gaps in unemployment compensation, health insurance, and even getting paid. Our Get Paid, Not Played Campaign to protect freelancers from unpaid wages is one of the ways we’re working on addressing that (and now’s the time to join the campaign if you haven’t already). But just getting these issues into the public eye is another big part of what we’re doing. As Thompson puts it, “A 21st century workforce requires a different kind of safety net, with benefits that are more flexible, portable, personal.” We couldn’t have said it any better ourselves.