In 2024, approximately 59 million Americans did some form of independent or contingent work. Of those, roughly 40% had no access to employer-sponsored health insurance, no retirement plan, no paid leave, and no disability coverage. They were one health event away from financial catastrophe, and the companies that relied on their work had structured the relationship specifically to avoid any obligation to provide them with protection.
This is not an accident. The independent contractor classification exists, in large part, to allow companies to access labor without incurring the benefit costs associated with employment. The savings are real: benefits typically add 30–40% to the cost of an employee. The risk transfer is also real: the worker bears all of it.
The contingent workforce model is a risk transfer mechanism. The employer transfers the risks of employment — benefit costs, payroll taxes, workers' compensation, unemployment insurance — to the worker. The worker absorbs these risks in exchange for, theoretically, higher hourly rates and flexibility.
In practice, the rate premium rarely covers the actual cost of the transferred risk. A worker who needs to purchase individual health insurance, fund their own retirement, and self-insure against disability and unemployment needs to earn significantly more per hour than an equivalent employee to break even on total compensation. Most contingent workers do not earn that premium.
The workers who bear the most risk are the ones with the least ability to absorb it: lower-income workers in gig and platform economies, workers in industries with high injury rates, and workers who are older and therefore face higher health insurance costs and greater disability risk.
The solution is not to eliminate contingent work. Flexibility has genuine value for both workers and employers. The solution is to build the infrastructure that allows contingent workers to access the protections that employment currently bundles.
Portable benefits systems — benefit accounts that travel with the worker rather than being tied to an employer — are technically feasible and have been demonstrated in several European countries. Association health plans that allow independent workers to pool risk are legal in most states. Retirement savings vehicles for self-employed workers exist but are underutilized because they are complex and poorly marketed.
The infrastructure exists in fragments. What does not exist is a platform that aggregates these fragments into a coherent system that a contingent worker can actually use. Building that platform is part of what Seasoned.Work is building.
