I. Executive Summary

Over 70 million American citizens currently engage in some form of gig or freelance work. That represents over one-third (approximately 36%) of all working Americans. Generation Z has embraced this shift more enthusiastically than any previous generation, with 43% participating in the gig economy. Many Gen Zers began their careers in a time when traditional full-time employment was scarce due to the widespread effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic. While the gig economy affords workers greater flexibility than traditional forms of employment, it also can come at a significant expense. Because platforms classify gig workers as independent contractors,“they are excluded from many traditional workplace benefits such as health care coverage through their employer, retirement plans sponsored by their employer, unemployment compensation, and workers' compensation. Misclassification of gig workers costs them approximately $16.8 billion each year in wages and benefits.

The long-term consequences of the lack of access to affordable healthcare, retirement funding options, and financial stability will impact Gen Z’s ability to purchase homes, build wealth and plan for retirement. Workers from low-income households and workers of color will likely bear the greatest burden of this lack of access to resources. In the past, attempts to protect gig workers have been thwarted by the companies that employ them and/or the changing of administrations within government. This brief proposes four solutions: creating portable benefits accounts where benefits follow the worker; a new intermediate legal classification for platform workers that sits between "employee" and "independent contractor," that allows them to maintain flexibility in their schedules while receiving basic protections (e.g., minimum wage requirements and workers' compensation); requiring platforms to contribute to worker benefit funds; and providing automatic-enrollment retirement savings plans for independent workers. Together, these reforms offer a path toward a labor system that reflects how our changing workforce actually functions in the present day. 

II. Relevance and Background

The gig economy refers to a labor market characterized by short-term contracts, freelance arrangements, and platform-mediated work rather than permanent employment. It encompasses a broad range of work, from rideshare driving and food delivery to freelance design, content creation, and remote consulting, all united by their departure from the traditional employer-employee relationship. 

Gen Z has embraced this model readily. According to a 2025 Pew Research Center study, 43% of Gen Z workers participate in the gig economy, more than any previous generation at the same age, compared to 35% of Millennials and 28% of Gen X. Gen Z entered the workforce during a period of economic instability and a tightening job market, making gig work’s flexibility especially attractive and desirable. Nearly half of young gig workers cite the desire to “be their own boss” and to pursue their passions as primary motivators. 

Digital technology and app-based platforms have accelerated the growth of gig work. Digital platforms like Uber, DoorDash, and Upwork have lowered barriers to entry for independent work, and now facilitate nearly 88% of all gig economy activities, with mobile app-based work growing at 14% in transaction volume per year since 2021. The scale is significant: over 70 million Americans now participate in freelance work – roughly 36% of the U.S. workforce – and full-time independent workers more than doubled from 2020 to 2024. 

The contrast between traditional employment and gig work is stark when it comes to economic security. A conventional full-time employee typically receives employer-sponsored health insurance, contributions to Social Security and Medicare, paid leave, and access to unemployment insurance if they lose their job. Gig workers typically do not receive these protections automatically. Platform workers classified as independent contractors are generally ineligible for workers’ compensation in the event of work-related injuries, financial support if they lose income, paid medical leave, and paid family leave. They also bear the full cost of self-employment taxes and must fund their own retirement savings. For a generation already facing student debt and rising housing costs, this absence of a financial cushion carries serious long-term consequences. 

Traditional employment law – including the Fair Labor Standards Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and Title VII – was designed around stable, long-term employer-employee relationships. Under U.S. federal and most state labor laws, independent contractors are not entitled to minimum wage, overtime pay, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, or paid sick leave. Because gig platforms classify workers as independent contractors, companies avoid providing employee-sponsored healthcare, Social Security benefits, and unemployment insurance. As Gen Z continues to reshape American work, the gap between how labor law was written and how work is actually performed demands urgent policy attention. 

III. Tried Policy

Policymakers at both the federal and state level have made attempts to create protections for gig workers. Over the past decade, a series of regulatory and legislative efforts has attempted to update legal classifications for workers in order to extend benefits and protections to gig workers, as well as hold platforms accountable for their treatment of workers and adherence to basic labor standards. These initiatives have produced real, if limited, improvements for workers in the gig economy. However, they have also been beset by certain legal challenges and opposition attempts, in addition to structural issues, often preventing them from comprehensively addressing the issues gig workers face. The record of tried policy reveals less of a story of failure than one of incomplete reform, leaving room to grow.

Worker Classification Reform: From AB5 to Federal Rulemaking

The most ambitious classification reform previously seen at the state level came from California. In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), which fundamentally changed the regulations surrounding how workers in California are classified; in other words, how they are determined to be either independent contractors or official employees of a company. Under AB5, a three-part “ABC test” was codified, under which all workers are presumed to be employees. A worker only qualifies as an independent contractor if the company that hires them can demonstrate that they are free from control, perform work outside the usual course of its business, and are engaged in independent trade (California Legislative Information, 2019). This is a significant change from the previous standard. Had it been applied broadly, it could have potentially lifted millions of Californian gig workers into the classification of full-time employee, which would entitle them to protections such as minimum wage, overtime pay, unemployment benefits, and paid sick leave.

However, as expected, gig economy platforms opposed these measures. Backed by companies such as Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Instacart, and others, Proposition 22 (Prop 22) was placed on the 2020 ballot as a direct challenge to AB5. Instead of granting gig workers the full status of employee, it stipulated that companies had to provide accident insurance, a limited healthcare provision for drivers averaging at least 15 active weekly hours per quarter, and a guaranteed 120 percent of minimum wage during engaged time. This represented a smaller set of protections than would have been guaranteed under AB5. In November 2020, the majority of Californians, roughly 58.6 percent, approved Prop 22. In July 2024, the California Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality in Castellanos v. State of California, which confirmed that app-based gig workers are not covered by the state’s workers’ compensation system (California Supreme Court, 2024). The attempt at policy reform in California shows the difficulty of classification reform when major platforms hold social and financial capital which they can use against reform attempts.

Meanwhile, at the federal level, the Department of Labor (DOL) has considered multiple competing frameworks depending on the party in power. In January 2024, the DOL issues a final rule that identified six factors for evaluating whether a work relationship constitutes employment under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which included the degree of control exercised over workers, the worker’s opportunity for profit or loss, and whether the work is integral to the employer’s business (U.S. Department of Labor, 2024). The Biden-era rule was viewed as favoring gig workers, making it harder for platforms to classify their workers as independent contractors. However, in 2025, under the new Trump Administration, the DOL Wage and Hour Division announced that it would no longer enforce the 2024 rule, instead defaulting back to a 2008 framework that was more favorable towards platforms while working to create a new solution (Harrison, 2025). In February 2026, the DOL proposed a new rule that would formally rescind the 2024 regulations, reverting to an economic reality test focused primarily on the degree of control over the worker (U.S. Department of Labor, 2026). This cycle of changing standards, which depends on the administration in power, leaves workers without a stable or reliable set of protections. It makes it effectively impossible for any single federal rule to serve as a reliable safety net. As the Congressional Research Service has noted, whether any given rule will result in more workers being classified as employees remains uncertain, and the continued back-and-forth reduces the weight courts place on DOL guidance altogether (Congressional Research Service, 2024).

The CARES Act: A Temporary Window of Inclusion

The most significant moment of federal expansions of protections for gig economy workers came through emergency pandemic legislation, rather than targeted and consistent labor law reform. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act of March 2020 (CARES Act) extended emergency pandemic unemployment assistance to independent contractors and self-employed workers, which marked the first time in American history that unemployment benefits had been made available to workers regardless of their legal classification status (National Employment Law Project, 2020). For a brief period, the legal difference between an independent contractor and a full-time employee was temporarily suspended for the purposes of pandemic relief, which gave gig workers access to the full protections of full-time employment.

However, the durability of this protection was faulty. The pandemic unemployment assistance program, while being extended several times, ultimately ended in September 2021, terminating the benefits of around 4.2 million people who had been enrolled. As of then, self-employed workers were once again categorically ineligible for unemployment benefits (Rocca, 2022). The pandemic demonstrates that the infrastructure for extending legal protections and benefits to gig workers does exist and in fact can be deployed if needed, but in this case required a political and humanitarian emergency to justify doing so. Without permanent legislative action, the gig worker protections of the CARES Act remained relegated to an emergency measure without leaving a structural legacy for the millions of workers who depended on it.

Persistent Gaps and the Limits of What Has Been Tried

Together, the policy record reveals a consistent pattern. State-level classification reforms like AB5 can be effectively challenged by industry campaigning and lobbying. Meanwhile, federal rulemaking on classification can be reversed with each change of administration, producing instability. Emergency benefit expansions like the CARES Act reach gig workers in a crisis but don’t create a lasting impact. As the Economic Policy Institute has documented, worker misclassification costs workers an estimated $16.8 billion each year in lost wages and benefits across the country, a figure that reflects not just platform behavior but also the structural failures of law to protect them (Rhinehart et al., 2021).

Moreover, what has been tried has largely been reactive instead of proactive and structural. Reforms have attempted to fit gig work into the old employee and contractor binary rather than building new frameworks appropriate to modern employment trends, which disproportionately impact Gen Z workers. The programs that have come closest to offering genuine protection were also designed as temporary measures. The result is a generation of workers who are occasionally acknowledged by policy, but never fully protected by it.

IV. Policy Problem

How the Current System Fails Gig Workers

At the heart of the gig economy safety net gap is a deceptively simple question: Are you an employee or an independent contractor? The answer to that question determines whether a worker receives healthcare, unemployment insurance, retirement contributions, paid leave, and dozens of other protections that most Americans take for granted. To the millions of Gen Z employees who make a living using apps like Uber, DoorDash, Fiverr, and Upwork, the answer is nearly always a contractor, and the effects of such a designation are extensive.

Worker Classification and Why It Matters

The difference between an employee and an independent contractor is not merely a technicality in the law. It is the entry point into the whole American labor protection system. The Fair Labor Standards Act covers employees by ensuring minimum wages and overtime. They are safeguarded under the National Labor Relations Act, which grants them the right to organize. Their employers must pay to Social Security and Medicare, and workers' compensation in case of injury, and contributions to state unemployment insurance funds. Independent contractors receive none of these guarantees.

Gig platforms have long argued that their workers prefer flexibility and therefore function as independent businesses rather than employees. Research, however, disputes this framing. A 2023 Economic Policy Institute report discovered that worker misclassification as independent contractors costs workers an estimated 16.8 billion each year in lost benefits and wage protection across the country. The classification system, as it currently stands, transfers financial risk almost entirely onto workers while allowing platforms to keep labor costs low.

The Healthcare Problem

Among the most direct effects of gig work classification, there is the lack of employer-provided health insurance. In the United States, an employer provides health coverage to about 54 percent of the population under 65 years old. This system does not apply to gig workers at all.

As per the 2022 survey by Freelancers Union and Upwork, almost 1/3 of full-time freelance workers said they were uninsured or underinsured at some time of the year. Premiums are high for those individuals who actually buy individual plans in the Affordable Care Act marketplace. In 2023, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that the average individual marketplace premium was $584 per month before subsidies, a significant burden for workers with unpredictable monthly income. Many gig workers simply go without coverage and absorb the financial risk of a medical emergency with no cushion.

Retirement Insecurity

The retirement picture for gig workers is equally concerning. Traditional employees benefit from employer-sponsored 401(k) plans with a matching contribution. Contributions to social security are divided between the employer and employee. Self-employed gig workers are required to pay the full 15.3% self-employment tax that includes Social Security and Medicare, as opposed to the 7.65% that employees pay, with employers covering the other half.

In addition to taxes, gig workers are left to establish and finance their own retirement plans, including a SEP-IRA or Solo 401(k), on their own without any employer contribution. In a 2021 survey of the Pew Research Center, just one out of five adults who are mostly earners on gig platforms had some form of retirement savings account. In contrast, 56% of conventional workers were covered by a workplace retirement plan. When this trend persists, it is quite likely that the current generation of gig workers will retire with much less to show than their conventionally employed counterparts.

Unemployment Insurance and Income Volatility

The standard employment process has an inbuilt financial cushion, i.e, the unemployment insurance. When an employee is laid off, he or she may claim state unemployment benefits, which are usually 40 to 50 percent of the former wages, on a short-term basis. In the standard situation, the gig employees would not have access to this system since the platforms are not subsidizing unemployment insurance funds on their behalf.

This is critical with the volatility of gig income. In a 2019 study conducted by the JPMorgan Chase Institute, it was discovered that gig workers had a monthly change in income of over 25 percent regularly. A driver who has altered their price algorithm on the platform, a freelancer who has lost a big customer, or a delivery worker who has been put out of commission by an injury has nothing to fall back on. The only exemption was the temporary extension of unemployment benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which was the first program to cover gig workers. The expiration of that program in 2021 reinstated the lapse in coverage.

Labor Laws Designed for a Different Era

The American legal system that regulates employees was constructed to a large extent during the 1930s and 1940s. The National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935. This was followed by the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. These laws were codified in a labor market characterized by factories, offices, and extended working relationships between one employer and one employee. The idea of a person making money on three apps at a time, none of which regards itself as employers, was merely nonexistent.

These old frameworks have been difficult to apply by courts and regulators to new gig arrangements. The main tests that are applied in determining the classification of workers, including the IRS behavioral control and financial control test, or the usual common law test of right to control, were not created to consider platform-based work. The various agencies have various standards that cause inconsistency and confusion. An employee may be considered an employee under the law of one state and a contractor under the federal law.

In 2019, California enacted AB5, which tried to solve this issue by introducing a more stringent worker classification test called the ABC test, which complicated the classification of workers as contractors. However, it was succeeded by a ballot measure, Proposition 22, in 2020, funded by Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash to the tune of millions of dollars, and which exempted app-based companies from the law. The back and forth was an example of how hard it is to reform when influential platforms stand to gain financially to retain the contractor model.

Long-Term Risks of Inaction

Unless this policy gap is closed, the risks are not limited to individual workers. With the expanding gig workforce, an increasing proportion of the working population will retire without sufficient savings, and this will strain the social security system and government support. The uninsured or underinsured gig workers end up costing taxpayers through healthcare expenses that are passed on to emergency rooms and state programs. A high rate of income instability in a large number of young employees may decrease consumer spending, which is one of the pillars of economic development.

A 2022 Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households published by the Federal Reserve revealed that adults whose incomes were variable had a much lower probability of reporting to be financially stable and were more likely to report that they would have difficulty with an unexpected payment of 400 dollars. As more and more Gen Zers rely on gig work as their main source of income, and the gig work they do is not accompanied by any of the protections that traditional employment offers, the economic vulnerability of the whole generation turns into an institutional issue in the economy at large.

The existing system is not a mirror of the real working of millions of people. It was not constructed on their behalf, and unless reform is consciously brought on, they will remain left behind.

V. Youth Impact

How the Gig Economy Shapes Gen Z's Financial Future

While the Gig Economy doesn’t affect all workers equally, for Gen Z, a generation that developed during constant economic crises, the absence of workplace protections in gig work was a defining feature of their early financial lives. Thus, understanding why so many young workers are concentrated in gig work and what that concentration means for long-term stability requires looking beyond the base-level statistics onto the structural conditions that shape Gen Z's economic reality.

Gen Z's Reliance on Gig Work

Gen Z’s participation in gig work is largely a response to structural economic conditions that made traditional employment less accessible to young workers. According to a 2025 Pew Research Center study, 43 percent of Gen Z workers participate in the gig economy, more than any other generation at the same age. Many entered the labor market during or just after the COVID-19 pandemic when they were faced with a period of mass layoffs, changes in work locations, and vast hiring freezes in industries that had historically absorbed young workers like retail and hospitality.

For a significant portion of Gen Z, gig work was a primary source of funding and key to a stable income. A 2025 Intuit report found out that almost half of Gen Z workers who were under 30 relied on independent work and “side hustles” as their supplement source of income compared to roughly 30 percent of Millennials at the same career stage. Such work offered what the traditional job market often could not provide at the time: immediate access to income and schedule control during a period of prevalent economic uncertainty. The primary issue is not that young workers chose gig work freely in an unconstrained market, rather, it was the most accessible option available.

Financial Instability Without a Supplement

The consequences of working without benefits begin immediately and compound exponentially over time. Without employer-sponsored health insurance, gig workers must either purchase individual marketplace plans or go without coverage entirely. For a 22-year-old earning $2,200 one month and $1,400 the next, a monthly insurance premium averaging $584 before subsidies, as reported by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2023, can be completely unaffordable. A 2022 survey by the Freelancers Union found that nearly one in three full-time independent workers reported being uninsured or underinsured at some point during the year.

Income volatility itself is a distinct and underappreciated harm. The JPMorgan Chase Institute found in its platform economy research that gig workers regularly experience month-to-month income swings exceeding 25 percent. For young workers without accumulated savings, parental financial support, access to credit, or even multiple streams of income, that level of instability can make even basic financial planning unreliable. The Federal Reserve's 2022 Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households found that adults with variable incomes were significantly less likely to describe themselves as financially stable and more likely to report being unable to cover an unexpected expense of $400. 

Barriers to Long-Term Financial Security

The long-term effects of early gig work without protections are severe. Lifetime aspirations of having sufficient retirement savings, owning a home, and building a good credit score all depend on consistent income and access to employer-supported savings structures that gig workers are systematically excluded from. As discussed in the Policy Problem section, only one in five adults who primarily earn income through gig platforms hold any form of retirement savings account, compared to 56 percent of conventional workers covered by a workplace retirement plan, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey.

This gap has direct implications for housing stability as well. This is seen as mortgage lenders and landlords typically require proof of steady income, and workers with irregular 1099 earnings often find it difficult to qualify for loans or leases even when their total annual income is comparable to that of salaried applicants. The result is that gig-dependent Gen Z workers are more likely to remain in rental housing longer and accumulate less wealth over the critical early decades of their financial lives. The Urban Institute has documented that early wealth gaps increase significantly over time, meaning that the financial disadvantages gig workers face in their twenties are unlikely to self-correct without structural intervention.

Unequal Impacts Across Gen Z

The burdens of gig work without protections are not evenly distributed across the generation. Gen Z workers from lower-income households, workers of color, and those without college degrees are disproportionately concentrated in the lowest-paying and most precarious segments of gig work like food delivery or rideshare driving. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2023 Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements report, workers in alternative employment arrangements were more likely to be Black or Hispanic and less likely to hold a bachelor's degree than workers in traditional employment.

For these workers, the absence of a safety net is not decreased by family wealth or supplementary income sources. A college-educated Gen Z freelancer working in digital marketing who has access to parental support and can navigate ACA marketplace enrollment faces a fundamentally different risk than a Gen Z delivery driver with no savings who is one injury or system change away from losing their income entirely. Policy responses that treat all gig workers as a uniform group risk designing solutions that primarily benefit the more financially stable segments of this workforce while leaving the most vulnerable behind.

VI. Policy Solutions

The current gig economy safety net gap shows that labor policy has not kept up with the structure of modern work. Existing benefits systems are still largely attached to a single long term employer, even as millions of workers now earn income through contract work, app based jobs, freelance labor, and multiple income streams. Federal data from July 2023 showed that 11.9 million people were independent contractors in their main job, representing 7.4 percent of total employment, while the Federal Reserve reported that 20 percent of adults performed some form of gig activity in the prior month in 2024, with younger adults more likely than the general population to participate. Effective reform therefore must preserve the flexibility that many independent workers value while extending a more stable floor of benefits and protections that doesn’t disappear when workers decide to move across jobs or platforms.

Establish portable benefits accounts for independent workers

One of the most clear ways to modernize worker protections without having to relocate all gig work into a traditional employment model is to establish portable benefits accounts that are attached to the worker rather than the employer. Benefits like health coverage support, paid leave, retirement contributions, or disability protection would follow workers across multiple jobs and platforms instead of ending simply when a contract ends. The National Conference of State Legislatures describes portable benefits as benefits tied to an individual rather than a single employer, which allows workers to combine contributions earned across different sources of work. This model is now especially relevant in the gig economy, where workers often earn income from several platforms at once. Utah has already authorized voluntary portable benefit plans, showing that states are starting to test the administrative structure for this approach. Under a scaled model, contributions could be funded through a fixed percentage of platform payments or hours worked, pooled into individual accounts and administered at the state or federal level. A national or state level portable account system would directly address one of the biggest weaknesses in gig work by making benefit accumulation possible even in fragmented labor markets, although it would still require clear rules on funding, oversight, and eligibility in order to avoid becoming too voluntary or too limited in scale.

Modernize worker classification law through a clearer intermediate framework

A second reform could instead focus on worker classification itself, since the current employee or independent contractor divide is too rigid for platform based labor. Under current federal law, classification determines access to wage protections, overtime hours, and other workplace rights, yet the Department of Labor has acknowledged that misclassification can deny workers minimum wage, overtime pay, and other protections. At the same time, the federal framework is inconsistent across laws and jurisdictions. The Department’s 2024 rule reaffirmed a six factor economic reality test under the Fair Labor Standards Act, but it also made it clear that this rule does not control classification under other federal, state, or local laws. That fragmented structure leaves workers and firms operating under overlapping and sometimes conflicting standards. Congress or the Department of Labor could establish an intermediate legal category through federal legislation or rulemaking, with enforcement tied to existing wage and hour oversight systems. A more workable reform would create an intermediate legal category for dependent contractors, meaning workers who retain schedule flexibility but still qualify for baseline protections such as minimum earnings standards, collective bargaining rights, workers compensation coverage, and contributions to social insurance programs. This approach would better reflect the economic reality of platform work than the current all or nothing system, although policymakers would still need to define the threshold for dependency carefully so that firms cannot evade responsibility through technical redesigns of work arrangements.

Require platform contributions to worker benefit funds

Portable benefits and classification reform are going to remain incomplete unless gig platforms are also required to contribute financially to the systems from which they benefit. A central problem in the current model is that platforms externalize the cost of labor protections onto workers and, eventually, onto the public. Requiring a small contribution from each covered transaction or hour worked into an individual worker benefit fund would begin to correct that imbalance. The National Conference of State Legislatures has noted proposed state frameworks in which gig companies contribute to portable benefit arrangements based on hours worked or a percentage of transaction fees. Existing state and local policies also show that platform specific obligations can be administered in practice. New York’s Independent Livery Drivers Benefit Fund provides workers compensation benefits for qualifying independent livery drivers, and Seattle’s app based worker ordinances now require large network companies to provide paid sick and safe time and comply with minimum payment rules for covered app based workers. These contributions could be collected through platform reporting systems and directed into regulated benefit funds administered at the state or federal level. These examples definitely do not solve the entire safety net gap, but they do show that governments can make benefit related contributions or protections mandatory even when workers are not treated as standard employees. The main drawback, then, is that platforms can pass some of the costs onto consumers or try to reduce available work at the margin, but that tradeoff is difficult to avoid if the current model continues to rely on artificially low labor costs created by benefit exclusion.

Expand government supported retirement and savings infrastructure for nontraditional workers

Even with better classification rules and platform contributions, many gig workers will still need a more reliable and automatic public savings framework because they are less likely to have consistent access to employer sponsored retirement plans. The Internal Revenue Service allows self employed workers to use tools such as SEP plans and one participant 401(k) plans, but those options still require workers to set up and fund accounts on their own, which is a major barrier for workers with irregular income. That’s why recent state auto IRA programs offer a more scalable model. Georgetown’s Center for Retirement Initiatives reports that, as of February 2026, 17 state programs were open to eligible employers and workers, with more than 1.2 million funded accounts and about $2.96 billion in assets administered across programs. A stronger policy response could build on this model by creating a federal or multi state auto enrollment savings option for independent workers, with payroll style contributions triggered automatically through digital platforms unless workers choose to opt out. These accounts would be primarily funded through worker contributions drawn proportionally from platform earnings, with potential government incentives or matching contributions to encourage participation. This would move retirement saving from a more optional decision to a default feature of nontraditional work, which is important because defaults are usually far more effective than voluntary uptake alone. The main limitation is that expanding access to savings alone doesn’t actually address low earnings, although it would reduce long term insecurity created by a labor market in which many workers operate without any employer backed retirement structure.

VII. Conclusion

The gig economy safety net gap is not just a minor policy oversight, it is a structural failure that will effectually shape the economic futures of tens of millions of workers and entire generations. With Gen Z continuing to enter a labor market where gig and freelance work are increasingly the norm rather than exception, the lack of healthcare coverage, retirement savings infrastructure, unemployment insurance, and basic wage protections will carry compounding consequences beyond individual workers. All of the policies tested so far (from California's AB5 to the temporary expansions in the CARES act) have demonstrated both that reform is possible and that piecemeal approaches are insufficient. Modernizing worker protections would bring labor policy closer to the realities of today’s labor market. Key reforms include portable benefits accounts, intermediate worker classifications, platform contributions, and automatic retirement savings plans. The strength of any economy depends on the stability of its workers. Updating labor policy to reflect the realities of modern work is essential for long-term economic stability.

VIII. Acknowledgement

The Institute for Youth in Policy would like to acknowledge Adwaya Yesare for editing this brief.

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