A Changing Workforce Requires a Changing Approach to Worker Benefits and Protections
By Nyia Hawkins, Ambitio US Fellow
“Think of every single gig worker as a small business owner,” said Center for Cultural Innovation President and CEO Angie Kim at a recent panel discussion hosted at The Aspen Institute in Washington.
It’s the quote that defined her comments for me as I sat in the audience of the think tank event, ‘ How Benefits Make Jobs Better .’ The Institute’s now former Director of the Future of Work Initiative, Shelly Steward, moderated the discussion, which brought together voices from across the employment spectrum. The other panelists include Tonya Hallett, Amazon’s Vice President for People eXperience Technology (PXT), who spoke about the company’s innovative approaches to employee benefits, and Betsy Biemann, CEO of Coastal Enterprises, who shared success stories of small businesses making significant strides in offering competitive benefits. Panelist Emily Martin, Chief Program Officer from the National Women’s Law Center highlighted state-level policy advancements.
Though, as a fellow for CCI’s Ambitio US initiative, I am admittedly biased, the paradigm shift Kim spoke of helped frame the discussion for me and for policymakers, funders, employers, and workers who seek to address the disparities in access to benefits and protections that currently plague our labor market. That paradigm shift undergirds CCI’s Sol Center for Liberated Work (Sol), our research and advocacy arm. Sol also incubates projects that reimagine work and social protections for all workers.
So, as I looked at gig workers through the lens of entrepreneurship, I didn’t just consider the people who drive Uber or deliver for Doordash. I thought about the population of people who might be anything from architects to hair stylists, submitting 1099 tax forms around this time of year rather than — the more common — W-2s. The percentage of Americans doing freelance work is up 11% over the last decade, from 53 million in 2014 to 64 million in 2023, according to Statista.com , and that number is growing. The rise of gig and freelance work puts increasing pressure on a critical gap in our benefits and protection systems, where a significant portion of the workforce is without the safety net traditionally provided by full-time employment.
This perspective is not just a semantic shift, it is a call to action for creating a more inclusive and comprehensive benefits system. By recognizing gig workers as entrepreneurs of their own micro-enterprises, we can start to develop policies and systems that offer protections and benefits to all, irrespective of their employment status. A broadened understanding of who constitutes a worker is essential for crafting legislation and support mechanisms that reflect the realities of a rapidly changing economy.
Kim is based in California — the world’s largest sub-national economy — which has started experimenting with portable retirement benefits. Unfortunately, those benefits are “…still conferred to only those going from employer to employer and not necessarily for independent workers” said Kim. “But, those (experiments) create these bright spots of opportunity to say, “How can we expand that?”
It was also exciting to hear her bring pooled risk funds into the discussion as a financial tool to aggregate risk for sick and family leave protection for gig workers. Drawing inspiration from the successes of movements like Ambitio US grantee Debt Collective , Kim suggested that gig workers and others outside traditional employment structures can organize for greater influence and security. This collective action can drive significant change, showcasing the power of workers’ voices when mobilized around shared concerns.
This vision not only reflects an aspiration for a more equitable workforce but also underscores the urgent need for innovative thinking and collaborative problem-solving among all stakeholders.
This article was originally published on Medium. Read it on Medium →
Healing, Bridging, Thriving: A Summit on Arts and Culture in our Communities
By Cate Fox, Ambitio US Program Director
At the end of January, the White House Domestic Policy Council and the National Endowment of the Arts invited 500 artists, practitioners, academics, funders, and policymakers to Washington, D.C., to gather for the first of its kind one-day meet-up called Healing, Bridging, Thriving: A Summit on Arts and Culture in our Communities. CCI President & CEO Angie Kim and I joined our colleagues from around the country for the pre-gatherings and the in-person summit. It was wonderful to be in the room with great thinkers and friends (some of whom I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic.)
The formal agenda for the day of the summit was broken up into three sections mirroring the title of the event (Healing, Bridging, Thriving), with presentations from national figures, including performers, arts leaders, and policymakers. It served as an external exclamation of the federal government’s commitment to creatives through grant programs that included but extended beyond the National Endowment for the Arts. Seeing policymakers, like the Surgeon General, White House Senior Advisor, representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency, White House Domestic Policy Council, and Health and Human Services, and Congressional representatives, on the stage discussing the importance of the involvement of artists and creatives in issues critical to our democracy felt like our sector was being seen in a new way.
They made the case that arts and cultural practices are integral to a holistic sense of community wellness and foster feelings of belonging that are critical to our well-being. You can catch the livestream from the event here . If you are interested in the details, our colleague Ted Russell, Director of Arts Strategy and Ventures at The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, wrote an excellent summary of the day .
If your time is limited, I suggest listening to National Endowment Chair Dr. María Rosario Jackson’s opening remarks and a closing reflection from Marc Bamuthi Joseph (Vice President of Social Impact at the Kennedy Center). Chair Jackson reminded us that art happens everywhere; the impulse to create is in all of us. She also discussed the importance of creativity as a process. This shows up in our work with Ambitio US Economic Trailblazers, where the arts and creative practices are about everyone participating in something together in order to strengthen the community as much as they are about producing an end product. It made me think about the complicated history and implications of arts funding in philanthropy. In his closing reflection, Bamuthi speaks to the artist’s heart — can our democracy survive without inspiration or belief? If racism is structural, then doesn’t anti-racism also have to be structural? How can we serve communities? What is our role in an equitable future? After a day of amazing presentations, I was so glad to sit with these big questions.
The cross-governmental cooperation on stage and the audience full of amazing arts leaders is a reminder to us of the incredible power that can be harnessed when we share goals and a vision for a better future. This is a tribute to National Endowment Chair Dr. María Rosario Jackson and her staff who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to build relationships with those in other areas of government service and those in the field to determine what could be done together. Congratulations on a tremendous day! And let’s dream about what to do next.
This article was originally published on Medium. Read it on Medium →