I’m so over benefits
This term is undermining our goals
When people ask me what I do, I usually say I work on getting gig workers and the self-employed access to benefits like health insurance, unemployment, and retirement—stuff most people get through their job. And that’s enough to communicate the gist.
I used to say that I work on getting folks access to social protections, social insurance, or the social safety net, but people never knew what I was talking about. I’d just get this blank stare. It’s only when I put it in the context of “benefits'' that they’d nod in understanding.
And that makes sense, because in the United States, we really only understand social insurance as a benefit that an employer deigns to give us. It’s a perk you get for working for a particular company.
This framing is a relic of US history. Back in World War II, the US government put wage caps in place to control costs, so employers started offering health insurance and pensions to attract the labor they desperately needed.
Later, the government entrenched that system by giving large tax breaks to employers who offered benefits and regulating the social insurance market around employee risk pools. The employer-based benefit system we have today is really just an accident of history.
But we’ve let that accident of history constrain the way we think about social protection in this country.
The term we use to describe the way we access social insurance has become the name for those protections. And that clouds our thinking in a couple of important ways.
First, it makes social protection contingent on employment. That’s unfortunate because lots and lots of people who need social protections are not employed. Independent workers, unpaid caregivers, new entrepreneurs—our framing just writes them out of the conversation from the get go.
Second, “benefits” makes these protections seem optional, like a nice add on, and not a fundamental human right. It feels like as a society, we’re saying “Sure, you can have this job, and maybe if you’re really lucky we’ll throw in some basic economic security.” What?
Finally, it puts social insurance right in the middle of the unequal power relationship between employers and employees. Want to expand coverage? You have to build sufficient power (bargaining power, regulatory power, reputational power—it’s all power) to pressure employers to change their behavior.
In effect, we’ve ceded power over our collective economic security to employers, who, as well all know, are not generally in the business of optimizing for social good.
You can see the consequences all around us.
Take recent efforts to expand retirement access through automatic IRAs. It’s been a huge success and we are covering a lot more folks, but only if they’re on payroll. What about everyone else? They’re an edge case that never even made it into the conversation, because the conversation was about benefits.
We’re also seeing more reports that employers are cutting benefits to offset inflationary pressures. Turns out when your retirement plan is a discretionary perk, it’s a whole lot easier to justify cutting it.
Or consider recent efforts to promote “good jobs.” I like a good job as much as the next person, but when you drill down into the specifics, the goal is to get employers to do more for their employees. Instead of building power to do a thing, we have to build power to pressure someone else to do a thing. And again, we leave lots of folks out.
Ultimately, the language that we use matters.
Our language shapes the mental models we use to understand the world, to decide which challenges to tackle, and to filter possible solutions.
So instead of good jobs, I think we need to talk about good work. And instead of benefits, I think we need to talk about protections. Protections we all deserve, regardless of where we work, how we work, or even if we work.
What do you think? Got any great terms or phrases to help us break open the debate? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Relatedly, I’m super excited about my friend Natalie Foster’s new book called The Guarantee, which comes out in April. Natalie’s got lots to say about building economic security for all. You can (and should!) pre-order it here.
Odds and Ends
Some recent collective bargaining activity in the arts: entertainment craft union IATSE started contract negotiations this week, while workers at MASS MOCA authorized a strike.
Ugh. Business groups filed their case against the new DOL classification rules, even though their own analysis says it doesn’t impact their business model. Why are we fighting these fights?!?
Gig work is on the rise in Canada. A new study found nearly 1 million Canadians rely on gig work as their main source of income, and another 1.5 million did gig work at some point in the last year.
The Philadelphia mayor’s new budget includes real money for enforcing their Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, a helpful reminder that legal rights only matter if you enforce them.
America is the land of opportunity for entrepreneurs to launch new businesses … so long as they have a spouse with health insurance or are sitting on a stack of gold coins tall enough to pay out of pocket. So, are we getting the best and brightest innovators bringing new ideas to market, or are we getting only the output from a population pre-filtered by wealth or good fortune?
But it’s by design, right? Corporate jobs are so universally dissatisfying, they’ve got to keep you in the gilded cage somehow. What once were benefits to woo workers are now essentially threats to keep them entrapped.
Thank you, Althea! I'm a disability organizer currently working at Creatives Rebuild New York, which uses employment and guaranteed income to support artists' economic security. You're explaining exactly why I can only tolerate saying "so-called benefits" to latch onto the legibility of the term so people get what I'm referring to at all, but also register critical distance from the disposability built into this term.
Here's an example from our work that shows the frustrating durability of "benefits": We've been building a framework for plain language materials about our programs as a way to increase the accessibility of written materials and also, in the case of guaranteed income, to understand more about what language works best for an emergent movement that can mean many different things to different people. It's essential in plain language work to learn directly from those who use these materials, so we conducted a focus group with neurodivergent artists at Summertime Gallery in Brooklyn. The easiest way for us all to understand what "guaranteed income" was in that group was to call it a "new benefits program." So even though the dream of basic and guaranteed income organizers is to establish permanency of an economic floor with unrestricted funds not tied to any obligations at all, it's being subsumed by the legibility of "benefits." It's no wonder so many guaranteed income programs need to overcome widespread public suspicion about these programs being scams.
This leads us to something else we're working on: how to best protect access to public benefit programs for those people who, as you say, are consistently burned by the centrality of employment for economic dignity. When many disabled folks would lose access to an SSI check if they accept time-limited funds from a guaranteed income program, they can experience a double cliff by the end. Here, the word "income" has some similar problems to "benefits." Even when this "income" is meant specifically to insulate people from harmful working conditions, the public "benefits" complex almost always calculates that support as earned income that leaves people in a lot of confusion and uncertainty.
Thank you for laying this out so well!