Should independent contractors get employment benefits? The question has fueled decades of legal and political battles — and it might finally be coming to an end for the roughly 58 million people who currently work as freelancers, contractors and gig workers across America.

Three Republican senators — led by Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the chamber’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee — have introduced bills to expand benefits like health insurance and retirement savings for contractors. The legislation would protect companies from worker misclassification lawsuits if they offered contractors non-salary perks, and Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley (CA) introduced companion bills back in February.

Advocates of these so-called portable benefits argue that they support the realities of the current workplace. In 1947, Congress explicitly carved out independent contractors from the National Labor Relations Act’s definition of “employee.” Today, most contractors say they’d prefer to keep their independent arrangements but want more financial stability. Cassidy has hailed passing these bills a top priority for him this year.

The portable benefits most likely to pass now, however, are less robust and worker-friendly than some progressive Democrats were envisioning ten years ago. Back in 2015, tech entrepreneur Nick Hanauer and David Rolf, former SEIU president of the Seattle Local 775, pitched a proposal where employers would contribute $2 an hour to a “shared security system.”

Benefits would accrue by the hour, pool across multiple jobs, and be accessible whether someone worked for one company full-time or five part-time. A year later, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) outlined a different approach: Instead of requiring employers to pay in, she proposed building public systems that would let workers take benefits like health care and retirement from job to job. In his final State of the Union address that year, Barack Obama also endorsed the general idea, emphasizing that “basic benefits should be just as mobile as everything else is today.”

But unions strongly opposed these efforts. Labor groups have long fought against worker misclassification, where wrongly designating employees as contractors allows employers to sidestep payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, minimum wage laws and other obligations. Unions view codifying portable benefits largely as a way to keep misclassifying workers and therefore cut them off from core workplace protections, including the right to unionize.

Unions and union-funded nonprofits argue that portable benefits offer a false choice between job security and flexibility, and point to examples like nurses and restaurant workers where employees can still enjoy more flexible environments. The portable benefits approach, they warn,........

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