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Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Shared security, shared growth: a social contract for the 21st century (with Senator Mark Warner and Abby Solomon)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.81.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2019

⏱️ 50 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There are nearly 60 million gig economy workers in the U.S. workforce, yet benefits like health care, retirement, and paid leave are still tied to traditional salaried jobs. It is essential that we adopt new policies guaranteeing all workers the basic level of economic security necessary to sustain and grow the American middle class—and with it, the economy as a whole. This week, Senator Mark Warner and SEIU 775 Benefits Group Executive Director Abby Solomon imagine what a shared security system designed to fit modern flexible employment realities might look like. Senator Mark Warner is the senior U.S. Senator from Virginia. He serves on the Senate Finance, Banking, Budget, and Rules Committees as well as the Select Committee on Intelligence, where he is the Vice Chairman. From 2002 to 2006, he served as Governor of Virginia. Senator Warner spent 20 years as a successful technology and business leader in Virginia before entering public office. Twitter: @MarkWarner Abby Solomon is the Executive Director of SEIU 775 Benefits Group, overseeing trusts for training, health, and retirement benefits for Washington state’s Home Care Aide workforce. The Benefits Group provides portable benefits to 50,000 home care workers. Previously, Abby was the Director of Home Care Campaigns at SEIU, where she led national advocacy campaigns representing 1.9 million workers and 100+ occupational fields throughout the United States and Canada. Twitter: @SEIU775BG Further reading: Shared Security, Shared Growth: https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/37/shared-security-shared-growth/ Portable Benefits for an Insecure Workforce: https://prospect.org/article/portable-benefits-insecure-workforce Building a portable benefits system for today’s world: http://seiu775.org/building-a-portable-benefits-system-for-todays-world/

Transcript

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0:00.0

You have a third of the workforce with no social insurance.

0:04.8

That to me is a recipe for disaster.

0:06.7

We definitely need to get to a system where if I work for an hour for a company,

0:10.8

I get an hour's worth of benefits.

0:12.8

There is an interrelationship between healthy, robust economies

0:16.8

and places that have high labor standards.

0:19.2

When we invest more in services and supports. It helps everybody.

0:24.0

From the offices of Civic Ventures.

0:26.0

From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics with

0:38.3

Nick Hanauer.

0:39.8

It's like Econ 101 without all the BS.

0:45.0

I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

0:51.0

Hey I'm Zach Silk and I'm the president of Civic Ventures. Hey, I'm Zach Silk and I'm the president of Civic Ventures.

0:55.3

So in this episode of Pitchfork Economics, Zach and I are going to talk about something that's

1:01.6

been described as portable benefits.

1:03.0

So what are portable benefits, Zach?

1:06.0

Well, it's the idea that when you work, you normally have a set of benefits that are associated with you.

1:11.0

That's sort of been established as a social

1:13.7

contract between an employer and employee. Those current benefits are actually stuck to you

1:20.0

vis-à-vis your employer and one of the things that we've been thinking a lot about is that the nature of work has changed

1:25.6

so dramatically that it's very rare that you have one employer that you carry throughout your life.

1:31.8

And so we've been sitting around in our office thinking about for some

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