In honor of Labor Day, yesterday National Arts Policy Alliance (NAPA) and Freelancers Union released a new report, Co-Designing Worker-Centered Portable Benefits, based on a new survey, interviews, and a collaborative workshop with independent workers on what they actually need from a modern safety net.

First and foremost, we know that freelancers need improved access to healthcare. As it stands, there are too few options for the self-employed, with unnecessary hoops to jump through to obtain it and exorbitant costs to keep it. 

You may have heard us talk about portable benefits. Portable benefits would clear barriers for clients to disperse money into an independent worker’s account to use for healthcare and other benefits like time off. These accounts would then stay with the worker throughout the rest of their gigs, accumulating money from different sources.

The paper, co-authored by FU Executive Director Andrea Gordillo and NAPA Co-Director Althea Erickson lays out three concrete policy models lawmakers could pursue now: a pooled Independent Worker Benefit Fund, a buy-in to New York's Essential Plan, and a Federal Independent Worker Health Plan with expanded ACA subsidies.

Read the full report, as well as this op-ed by Andrea and Althea in The Observer.  

Stay tuned for more on this in the weeks and months to come. The social safety net must be broadened, and expansion will only come if we demand it.