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This Labor Day, It’s Time for a New Social Contract With Workers

Millions of Americans now work across multiple jobs, clients and sources of income, yet access to health insurance, retirement savings and other basic protections still depends largely on having a single employer. This Labor Day, it’s time to ask whether the social contract can move with the worker.

On Monday morning, a teaching artist leaves a Bronx public school after leading music class. In the afternoon, she edits a nonprofit newsletter. That evening, she performs at a community theater. She works three jobs and pays taxes on every dollar she earns. However, should she get sick in the next month, no single employer will help her pay for health insurance. Labor Day was founded to honor the American worker. This year, it’s worth asking: which American worker? 

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Today, an estimated 58 million Americans, or 36 percent of the U.S. workforce, identify as independent workers, spanning freelance, contract, gig and temporary work. In some industries, such as in the arts, half of workers are self-employed in their primary job. Data from Upwork’s 2025 Future Workforce Index estimates that freelancers contributed $1.5 trillion in economic earnings in 2024. Yet many of the protections and benefits of traditional employment—health insurance, retirement savings, paid leave and workers’ compensation—still depend on having a single, full-time employer. 

As the affordability crisis forces more people to cobble together income from multiple gigs and artificial intelligence transforms how work gets done, millions of Americans are likely to earn a living outside traditional employment. Many workers value the flexibility and autonomy that freelance work can provide. The question is whether the social contract can evolve to protect workers without requiring them to give up that flexibility. We need new worker protections that account for the ways people actually work. Research conducted over the past year with creative independent workers, including surveys, interviews and co-design workshops with Freelancer Union members, points to a........

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