Portable benefits: building protection and power in the new non-standard safety net
Creators: name: Gervis, Alexandra
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2021

description: Workers today are Uber drivers, Task Rabbiters, domestic workers, and freelance consultants, with work arrangements as varied as the jobs themselves. Considered “non-standard,” these workers exist outside of traditional W2 relationships between employer and employee, leaving them without the protective benefit structure that a company typically provides (Kalleberg and Marsden 2015; Kalleberg 2018). One proposed solution to this is ‘portable benefits’ – i.e. benefits that are tied to the worker instead of the company, allowing a benefit structure to follow workers wherever their work brings them. In this dissertation, I examine the heterogenous group of actors and organizations that, while having disparate interests and orientations, have all coalesced around a portable benefits solution. This group includes policy actors looking to regulate non-standard work, worker-power and advocacy groups aiming to make non-standard work more secure, private employers of non-standard workers who want to enshrine the non-standard employment relationship, and for-profit benefit providers who see a business opportunity in the growing ranks of non-standard workers. Specifically, I undertake a qualitative exploration of this large and complicated portable benefits ‘field’ (Fligstein and McAdam 2011, 2012; DiMaggio and Powell 1983), drawing on in-depth interviews with heads of organizations designing portable benefit solutions, advocacy workers responsible for their implementation on the ground, think tank and thought leaders in the space, and observation of government boards tasked with recommending them and events held by organizations modeling them. Outside of the portable benefits field, groups that advocate for workers tend to wield typically less power, as in financial resources, political sway, and sheer membership size, than the private employers they often oppose. Yet, I find that in the portable benefits field, non-profits, advocacy groups, unions, and worker-led cooperatives have found ways to leverage the existence of the large, for-profit “tech” companies within the field to garner greater power for their own causes, both within and outside of the field. In rallying behind a solution that private employers also sanctioned, these worker-centered organizations knowingly and strategically joined these employers, and I look to the implications of these strategies for these organizations’ larger goals. Each chapter takes on a distinct element of these field dynamics. Chapter 1 provides context, laying out the organizational actors and models. Chapter 2 explores how organizations are embedding worker-centric values in their model design, using four mechanisms that I call (1) communal enrichment (2) reclaiming technology, (3) redistribution, and (4) revenue safeguards. Chapter 3 identifies two distinct frames that organizations use to describe non-standard work: (1) the independent frame, which sees non-standard workers heralding in a new, fluid style of work that is defined by flexibility and freedom; and (2) the standard frame, which suggests that this work is just standard employment by another name, the lack of recognition of which keeps non-standard workers in positions of precarity and vulnerability. Chapter 4 looks to understand how goals for building worker power brought actors to share the common field space, while the adoption of tech-company practices around innovation, iteration, experimentation, and ‘minimum viable products’ helped non-profit, worker-centered organizations reap greater success within the field. Finally, Chapter 5 examines the effect of the COVID-19 crisis on the work of the portable benefits field, employing the pandemic as a heuristic in understanding the impact of the field’s work. Though these chapters tackle discrete parts of the portable benefits field, my final argument is about the field structure itself: I assert that the heterogeneity of the actors within the same field did not mean that the powerful outmaneuvered the less powerful. Instead, in joining the field, these worker-power organizations collaborated with employers and often emulated them, mimicking their profit-based forms, technological aggregation systems, narratives around non-standard work, and practices around innovation. This dual approach of collaboration and emulation has yielded some forms of success for worker-power groups, who have enjoyed an influx of large and unrestricted grants from philanthropic partners and, in some cases, private capital. It has also resulted in one of the only successful portable benefits policy mandates to date in Philadelphia. These strategies also have implications for power outside the field: if creating portable benefit models allows these organizations to bring large groups of non-standard workers together in collective, reciprocally beneficial, non-collective bargaining-based structures, then it could become a source of worker power, i.e. the power that workers have vis-à-vis employers to set the standards and terms by which they work, far outside of just portable benefits. Though this remains to be seen, this set of worker-centered organizations seem well poised to capitalize on these successes in the future.