Safety Nets for Freelancers

Giving domestic workers a seat at the table elevates their voices and provides them with access to protections enshrined in labor laws. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the passage of the Philadelphia Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights extends worker protections to those previously left out of traditional labor laws. The new law, passed with the combined effort of the Pennsylvania Domestic Worker Alliance (PDWA), Philadelphia’s City Council, and the support of Philadelphia AFL-CIO, grants domestic workers access to employer-funded benefits and paid time off.

After enduring unfair working conditions, an organizing committee at a Starbucks in Tennessee, later dubbed the Memphis Seven, became the first of the state to attempt, and succeed, to unionize with help from Starbucks Workers United. Their work inspired a nationwide movement, and now over 250 Starbucks are unionized.

Liberty Cleaners co-created a curriculum to train immigrant women workers about tech education, green cleaning, and workers’ rights. As the first women-led workers’ hub in the country, the group is organizing and enabling its members with skills that can ensure they receive the fair wages, opportunities, and respect they deserve but are often denied.

Rural hospitals across the country often struggle to stay open in states where Medicaid has not been expanded, but a method known as "swing beds" has helped two critical-access hospitals in Georgia to avoid this fate. This method, which allows hospitals to swing beds from "only patients in need of acute care to those who no longer require the emergency department but still needed more treatment before a nursing home," allowed for the hospitals to pay off debt and expand services.

Rural hospitals often face a host of problems, especially when it comes to financial troubles; however, a small hospital in Wisconsin has been able to remain open by embracing a merger with a larger health care facility. This has lead to a handful of positive outcomes such as "significantly improved operating margins, higher quality and outcomes and better patient satisfaction"

The United States is currently facing a rise in the cost of specialty drugs, but the nation may be able to learn from Germany's successful approach to a drug pricing initiative. Based on keeping government involvement to a minimum, new drugs must go through a series of evaluations with a non-governmental agency before entering the market to prove that the new drug has an added benefit compared to the existing drug therapies.

The National Domestic Workers Alliance created a platform called Alia to deliver job benefits to home cleaners. Now, the NDWA is partnering with Thumbtack, a gig economy platform, in order to deliver this service to thousands more workers around the country. Alia allows employers to pay into a portable benefits fund for each cleaning session, funding paid time off and other job benefits.

The USA is currently at odds over its healthcare system. Perhaps, a solution can be found by looking to Japan's system which is a public-private hybrid where most is covered by the government and a smaller percentage is covered by employment sponsored or private insurance.

Throughout India, wastepickers – people who scour landfills for garbage they can sell to recyclers – live at the bottom of society. But the city of Pune did something radical: with the help of a collective, they did away with expensive garbage trucks, and now all household garbage is collected by wastepickers with pushcarts. Pune saves millions of dollars each year and recycles more – and the wastepickers have decent wages and social standing. The concept is now spreading globally.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) formed the first worker-driven social responsibility program in 1993, and since then they’ve advocated across industries for corporate social responsibility and preventing worker exploitation. The CIW also created the Fair Food Program which has helped add more than $45 million to farm workers’ paychecks.