A Bold New Plan to Renegotiate the Employer/Employee Contract for the 21st Century
Over at Democracy Journal, SEIU 775NW president David Rolf teamed with Civic Ventures co-founder Nick Hanauer to envision a new contract for employees in the 21st century. If you’ve ever complained that progressives aren’t coming up with big new ideas anymore, you must read this article.
Gone is the era of the lifetime career, let alone the lifelong job and the economic security that came with it, having been replaced by a new economy intent on recasting full-time employees into contractors, vendors, and temporary workers. It is an economic transformation that promises new efficiencies and greater flexibility for “employers” and “employees” alike, but which threatens to undermine the very foundation upon which middle-class America was built.
Basically, what this means is that the American worker lives in a state of constant uncertainty, jumping from paycheck to paycheck with very little (and often no) margin for error. But how do we confront this middle-class uncertainty? Here’s where the big idea comes in:
We propose a new Shared Security System that endows every American worker with, first, a “Shared Security Account” in which to accrue the basic employment benefits necessary for a thriving middle class, and second, a new set of “Shared Security Standards” that complement and reinforce that account.
The Shared Security Account would give every American worker—from piecemeal contractors to salaried employees—a certain base amount of benefits for every hour worked:
Mandatory accrued benefits should include a minimum of five days a year of paid sick leave, 15 days a year of paid vacation leave, a matching 401(k) contribution, and the same health insurance premium contribution as currently required under the Affordable Care Act (ideally, health care would fall into the insurance benefit category, but that is a larger battle). Employers—that is to say, whatever entity is paying the worker—would be required to contribute to the worker’s Shared Security Account with each paycheck, with the contributions prorated based on a standard eight-hour day, 40-hour week, and 2,080-hour year. For example, 20 days a year of combined vacation and sick leave is equivalent to a contribution of $0.0769 for every dollar of wages paid, and that is the rate at which companies like TaskRabbit and Uber would contribute for non-hourly piecework…
The Account would be bolstered by a set of Standards including equal pay for men and women, overtime pay, and fair scheduling standards.
This is important, forward-thinking stuff—a much-needed contract renegotiation between workers and employers for the 21st century. I encourage you to go read the whole article and spread it far and wide. Rolf and Hanauer don’t pretend to have all the answers in the article, but they do provide a great start to a very important conversation that should be the centerpiece of the 2016 presidential campaign.
