Nearly 60 million people in the U.S. fall into the broad category of independent workers and millions of others are both working and providing caregiving. On this episode, three guests with deep experience in this area discuss how the benefits system might be changed to better support these workers.
Nearly 60 million people in the U.S. fall into the broad category of independent workers. Those include contract, temporary and gig workers. Their jobs do not fall neatly into employer-connected benefit systems, so policymakers increasingly are exploring benefits that are instead attached to the worker.
Several states have enacted legislation allowing portable benefits to be set up in their state. Other states have created programs that offer automatic enrollment for employees without access to an employer-sponsored plan. All those efforts are aimed at expanding the ways people save for retirement and other needs.
On this episode to discuss the issue are John Scott, director of the Retirement Savings Project at Pew, Kristen Sharp of the Flex Association and Karen Kavanaugh, who's working with Tufts University on the Working While Caring Initiative.
All three talked about how the worker benefits system can better serve people in the changing economy and provide them with greater financial security.
Scott laid out the scale of the challenge to improve financial security for Americans and Sharp discussed how portable benefits can help the people her group serves, the millions of people whose work is app-based and need a better system to receive benefits. Kavanaugh is focused on how benefits employers provide can be better shaped to help the tens of millions of people in this country with caregiving responsibilities. She's overseeing a pilot project that's exploring how smaller employers can build in the flexibility needed by many caregivers.
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Ed: Hello and welcome to “Our American States,” a podcast from the National Conference of State Legislatures. I’m your host Ed Smith.
JS: The number of Americans aged 65 and over is going to increase by roughly 50% from 2020 to 2040 with an estimated of going from 54 million older Americans to 82 million. That’s a big increase and that has implications for the fiscal policy, has implications for the workforce.
Ed: That was John Scott, director of the retirement savings project at Pew. He is one of my guests on this podcast to talk about ways to expand how people save for retirement and other needs and how the worker benefit system can better serve people in a changing economy and provide them with greater financial security. My other guests on this episode are Kristian Sharp of the Flex Association and Karen Kavanaugh who is working with Tufts University on the working while caring initiatives. Nearly 60 million of people in the U.S. fall into the broad category of independent workers. Those include contract, temporary workers and gig workers. Their jobs do not fall neatly into employer connected benefits systems so policymakers increasingly are exploring benefits that are instead attached to the worker. Several states enacted legislation allowing portable benefits to be set up in their state. Other states have created programs that offer automatic enrollment for employees without access to an employee sponsored plan.
Kristin Sharp discussed how portable benefits can help the people her group serves, the millions of workers that is app-based and need a better system to receive benefits. Karen Kavanaugh focused on how benefits employers provide can be better shaped to help the tens of millions of people in this country with caregiving responsibilities. She is overseeing a pilot project that’s exploring how smaller employers can build in the flexibility needed by many caregivers. Here is our discussion starting with John Scott. John, welcome back to the podcast.
JS: Ed, it is great to be back. Thank you.
Ed: John, since we are going to be talking about financial security for an evolving workforce, could you help us set the stage a little? How is our workforce different today than it’s been in the past especially when it comes to workers achieving financial stability and how much of this is related to changing demographics versus a change in job market?
JS: Well, it’s probably a bit of both. We certainly know a lot about the longer-term trends. I’ll just mention a couple. In my world where I focus on retirement security, I am very much aware of the aging of the population which is not unique to the United States, but it’s certainly prevalent here and every state I think has seen an aging population. Just to give you a little bit of factoid, the number of Americans ages 65 and older is going to increase by roughly 50% from 2020 to 2040 with an estimate of it going from 54 million older Americans to 82 million. That’s a big increase and that has implications for fiscal policy. It has implications for the workforce. The workforce is going to get older because of flattening fertility, we are not going to see as many newer workers, the younger workers coming online. So, we are going to see an aging workforce. I think another trend that kind of goes with that, we are seeing a more educated workforce than we did maybe at my dad’s time. Certainly, older workers are more educated than they were 50 years ago and that has implications for an economy that is more service oriented than industrial. And so, we are seeing older workers increasingly enter the workforce. Some might have to enter the workforce because they haven’t saved enough, but others are finding that they are able to work a little bit longer than maybe my grandfather did or my father did.
I think that’s one of the changes that is filtering through the economy. I think the other is that we are seeing more and more workers who are what I would call nontraditional; maybe independent workers that they don’t have that traditional employer/employee relationship. We can talk a little bit more about that. That has implications for control over your work whether you have access to benefits, a steady paycheck or not. So, you know there’s a number of things like that. And then of course there’s some issues I’m sure you have talked about like the rise of artificial intelligence and who knows what that is going to do. But I think that’s going to intersect with some of these longer-term trends that we are seeing.
Ed: There are a lot of different ways for workers to increase their financial security including more recent innovative approaches such as portable benefits programs and state sponsored retirement plans. Can you walk us through what you’ve seen at your work at Pew regarding the different pathways to financial security.
JS: Yeah. Let me start a little bit broad for context and just say that people want to save. Honestly, we all want to have some financial security in our lives and I think part of that is being able to save out of your paycheck and people certainly want to do that as least we find from our survey data. But what often happens is that people have personal challenges. They might have an unsteady income. You know maybe they don’t get regular shift work or payroll will fluctuate for one reason or another. Or on the other side, they might have unexpected bills, a medical expense they didn’t count on or the car breaks down which they need to get to work. Those kinds of things can derail people from achieving what they perceive to be financial security. And just as an aside, we are going to be rolling out some new research around wealth and we’ve asked people what is wealth to you and for a lot of folks it’s not accumulating luxuries, but it’s just having certainty in their personal financial lives. And so, this idea of regular income you know shielded against unexpected expenses or medical bills and things like that those are very, very important. Now to your question about how do we get people on track, what are the basic approaches, you know we want to get people saving earlier in their lives like right out of school and then more consistently across their work lives. And so, it is really providing opportunities for people to save on a regular basis to buildup that both short term financial resilience as well as long term security for old age. And so, we are going to talk more about these tools, but just this is why we have these programs like the state auto IRA programs for retirement savings as well as portable benefits for those nontraditional workers.
TM: 6:37
Ed: So, John tell us what states are doing. Our audience of course is legislators and legislative staff and some others interested in state policy. So, tell us what you are seeing out in the states.
JS: Well, there’s a lot going on. I think that’s one of the great things about working at Pew is that we do a lot of work at state level and we just see a lot of innovation not just in financial security, of course, but including financial security and specifically in this field there are probably two big innovations. One has been going on for about eight years now and that’s the state mandated automated savings programs also called auto IRA’s where you have a statewide retirement savings pool for workers who don’t have a retirement plan at their job. So, if you don’t have a 401k at your employer, these statewide programs exist to get you into a savings program. It gives you an individual retirement account that follows you from job to job and so we can sort of fill those gaps. A lot of workers, they change jobs relatively frequently over the course of their life not always having access to retirement benefits so these state programs provide if you will a filler in those gaps where they don’t have a workforce retirement plan. And so, they can keep saving whether in an employer 401k or in this statewide program.
The other one are these portable benefits because we know that there are seemingly a growing number of workers who don’t have a traditional employer/employee job like I do at Pew. A lot of independent contractors and the like so these are very new. In fact, these are pilot programs in at least two states, Utah and Pennsylvania, where an online platform company will help fund an account that the worker can use for a variety of purposes. It could be for retirement, but it could be for other things. And that’s where it gives that financial resilience if they have a financial shock or they can use it for long term retirement savings.
Ed: The portable benefits idea is pretty recent. It sounds like it has promise as a way to provide benefits to independent workers though. Can you explain what portable benefits are and how they work for the employer and the employee.
JS: It’s really interesting and so again these are pilot programs; these are not widespread and so there is probably going to be some changes as you know they become more prevalent you know that’s the nature of a pilot. But the basic idea is that let’s just say, Ed, you are one of these workers that you might be a Doordasher or an Uber Eats delivery driver, whatever it might be, but, you know, you get paid through the transactions. It’s not like you have a regular paycheck and so there will be an account set up for you and this is all sanctioned under state law, but that account will be set up to receive a certain percentage of the transactions from the company whoever it’s Doordash or Uber or whomever, that money goes into the account some sort of percentage and then you have the ability to contribute to it as well. And then that account is a multiuse account. You can use it for an emergency and this all depends of course some state law and rules around it, but and so anybody listening to this should check those. But the idea is that if you have a short-term emergency, if you want to use it for medical bills or if you’d rather just save it and use it for retirement you know that money could be transferred over to an individual retirement account that you’ve set up. So, the idea is that you have flexibility of use. You can contribute to it, but there is a little bit of a seed money if you will from the company.
Ed: Do employers like this approach?
JS: I think like a lot of employers you know this goes back to our research at Pew we did many years ago talking to small business owners. It’s not as if employers don’t want to see their employees do well financially speaking, they do. And I think that’s true of these companies participating in these portable benefit programs. They are trying to think about beyond just a simple payment for a delivery you know a ride or whatever. You know how can we help these people be more financially secure because the sense is these will be more productive workers, they will be happier workers, they will be loyal, more willing to work for us. It is a competitive labor market. And I think there’s a sense you know we want to do well by these workers. We want to see them succeed.
Ed: I understand as many as 58 million people are independent workers in this country. Can you tell us who they are?
JS: It’s really tough to measure. It’s one of these things where surveys I think in the past have really struggled in part because it’s there are different definitions of you know whether it’s an online platform worker, someone who is a contingent worker. What we do know is it’s fairly large under a fairly broad definition and I tend to say these are workers who do not have a traditional employer/employee relationship. You know they essentially work for themselves. Well just to give you some examples for the listeners, that could include sales consultants. That can include insurance and real estate agents. That can include journalists. That an include day laborers, temp staff, personal care workers. So, you can see the wide variety of the types of work. We did a survey a few years ago asking nontraditional workers the nature of their jobs and roughly speaking you could put them into three buckets. There are workers whose only job is nontraditional or independent work so this might be the real estate agent that is not employed directly by a real estate company. They work for themselves.
Then you have the workers who sort of like me have had independent work in addition to a traditional job so I have my traditional job at Pew, but I’ve done teaching on the side before for contract work and for some other things on the side. So that blended traditional/nontraditional work is another bucket. And then there is the third bucket of people that combine a number of nontraditional jobs. They might a temp worker, but they drive for Uber on the side and they do some other work on the side so multiple jobs. And I think what this means is in terms of financial security there’s a variety of ways to get paid and there’s a variety of ways to save and provide for yourself even within this category of independent or nontraditional work.
Ed: John, as we wrap up, I want to tap into your vast knowledge of retirement in America. My understanding is that many people are not saving enough for retirement and I’m wondering if portable benefits, mandated state retirement accounts or some other approach might improve that situation.
JS: I think they can. I’m very optimistic about these programs. As I said the portable benefit programs are very, very new and we are studying, but they seem to have a good receptivity amongst the workers who are contributing to them and the employers seem to like them. I think at the end of the day what we are talking about is providing ways for people, including their employers ,to contribute to savings that is going to help people be resilient in the short term because almost everybody has some sort of financial shock at some point in their life and some people can’t absorb it and they get derailed and they spiral downhill financially. So, these programs are designed to help people absorb those shocks and keep moving forward but then keep moving forward toward a long-term goal of retirement security. And I think the idea of getting people or providing people with an opportunity to save throughout their working lives and do it consistently and hopefully with some help from an employer, you know we can make a real dent in terms of the insecurity that a lot of older Americans are facing today. So, I’m very optimistic about these programs and I think it really speaks to how the states are innovating in this space.
Ed: John, thanks so much for walking us through this topic. I think it’s one everyone should be interested in, especially as someone who is on the other side of the retirement wall, I know how critical it is to establish some financial security. Take care.
JS: Thank you, Ed. I appreciate it.
Ed: I’ll be right back after this short break with Karen Kavanaugh and Kristin Sharp.
TM: 15:10
Kristin, Karen, welcome to the podcast.
KS: Thanks so much Ed for having us on.
KK: Yes, thank you. Hello to both of you.
Ed: So, let’s take a moment for each of you to tell listeners about the focus in the area of financial security for our workforce that you are engaged in. Kristin, why don’t you start and tell us more about the Flex Association and the work to support gig workers and the others in the out based economy.
KS: Sure thing, Ed. Thank you so much. We really appreciate your interest in the topic. First and foremost, Flex is the voice of out based platform industry. We represent platforms and the people who use them. So digital platforms across the board in particularly those that workers are using to access income sources. There are lot of different stakeholders. There are workers, customers, small businesses that benefit from the tech connectivity. It is an industry that is transforming how people earn money, order, move and get things done in their lives and much of what we do is at Flex is educating policymakers in D.C. and around the country about why people choose to work through app based platforms and what are the other kinds of sort of structural supports that are changing and need to change in order to support digital workers. There is this very common misconception that people choose digital work because they can’t find a traditional job. And if you talk to gig workers, that is very far from the truth. Most app-based platform workers are accessing digital work because they want to make more money because they want to have flexible hours and because they want to be their own boss. Flex is dedicated to telling those stories and making sure that lawmakers understand why workers are partnering with this industry.
Ed: And Karen, tell us about your work. I know you are associated with Tufts and what that connection is.
KK: Again, thank you for inviting me and giving me the opportunity to talk about Working While Caring and elevating the issues of employee caregivers. And Kristin and I would love to know how many gig workers are employee caregivers and made that choice because they need flexibility. I lead Working While Caring which is an employer focused initiative designed to harness employers as a catalyst for change within the workplace and the broader systems of care. Specifically, to support employers in developing and evaluating supports for employee caregivers and we focus on those who are working while providing care for someone who is aging, ill or disabled so not childcare per say unless a child has a disability or a serious illness. These supports are designed to achieve 2 outcomes. One to help keep someone attached to the labor force and 2 to reduce the strain of balancing both worlds. As you likely know, employment is a primary driver of financial security and a key social determinant of health. Working caregivers face significant challenges, balance in both work and care and often grapple with difficult decisions about workforce participation, hours, additional responsibilities and promotions. Therefore, our focus is on helping them to stay connected to the labor force which is also the preference of most working caregivers. So, a little bit more context, caregiving is a new universal lifecycle experience. One that many people will have more than once during their lives and one wherein many people will encounter its variations. So, raising children, caring for a partner with a cancer diagnosis, helping a sibling with a substance use disorder, caring for an aging father or mother living with dementia. And yet despite its new universality, caregiving is still treated as a one-off experience rather than being recognized as a foundation of long-term care in this country.
So, changing the outcomes for caregivers requires new innovations and strategies at multiple levels across social, health and economic domains.
Ed: Well Karen, that’s a great point about the universality. I’ve certainly been through a couple of those cycles myself. Kristin, let me ask you about how the app-based platform world looks at portable benefits. Is this something workers want. Are the labor laws that we have now that weren’t really designed with this sort of world in mind, are they a hindrance to it?
KS: It’s a great question, Ed. And adverse state is what we to connect to Threads that we’ve been talking here and Karen’s question and yours so Karen mentioned how caregiving workers are operating in the gig economy and that is true that there are a huge number of people that choose at base platform work because they wanted to work around a care responsibility whether that is a parenting responsibility or an eldercare responsibility, there’s lots of ways that this happens. But two sort of primary ones. One is that people have a traditional job and they need to make more money and so they are turning to digital work in order to fill gaps in their income and have more than one income stream. And then secondly, it’s that they because of caregiving responsibilities, they can’t or don’t want to work a traditional job because they don’t want structured hours where they have to report at a certain time. They want to be able to work around medical appointments or a school schedule or something that is more variable. And so, the flexibility, no pun intended, of digital work is really important. To get to your question, people who are earning income through nontraditional work don’t have the same ways of accruing and structuring their benefits as traditional workers largely because the system of benefits we have today sort of evolved through working through traditional employers and so the benefits come from and are tax credited and different things through a traditional employer. And when a person is directing their own work schedule, working through multiple sources of income and that kind of thing ways to provide benefits doesn’t happen in the same way that it does with a traditional employer. You asked whether workers want this and yes, I think we see there’s a lot of variability in how and why people choose digital work to choose at least platform work. But you do see that many people are interested in thinking about how to access the retirement planning and the sort of financial savings and different kinds of things that come through a traditional 9-to-5 job in a different way now that we have all of these different alternative work streams that are possible because of digital work.
Ed: Karen, I think we can probably pretty easily see how portable benefits would be helpful to workers, but your research is looking at how flexibility with the benefits employers provide can help the worker who is providing caregiving and their family. Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of situations you encounter and how that works in the benefit’s world.
TM: 23:03
KK: Sure. A little bit of context again. One in five U.S. workers is also providing care for someone who is aging, ill or disabled. Again, this is outside of or in addition to raising a child or children. So, 20% of the workforce. A significant percentage and this is expected to grow due to demographic change particularly an aging population. There is a recent Sherm report that found that working caregivers should have looked at who are they caring for. To your question, Ed, 36% are caring for a child or children. Some of whom have a development disability or a serious illness. 17% are caring for an adult. 24% are caring for someone who is aging and 23% have multiple care responsibilities. And also, just another note about your question, we often consider care either at one and or the other life spectrum so the birth or the adoption of that child or caring for somebody who is aging. And yet there is a huge spectrum in between as well when we think about serious illnesses, substance use disorders or mental health conditions. And in most caregivers, 60% work full time and the average time that they spend providing care is about 20 hours a week so similar to having another part time job. And if you live with the care recipient, your time spent providing care is higher. Caregiving durations and trajectories are highly variable which is one reason caregiver needs are different than those associated with parenting. Caregiving can be urgent and immediate, intermittent, lengthy. In terms of durations, 19% of caregivers or caregiving trajectory lasts about 3 to 5 years and 24% last more than 5 years.
Turnover is an issue over the course of a career or work life and about 40% of employee caregivers report that they have had to leave a job due to caregiving responsibilities which can have a significant effect on household financial security and access to healthcare benefits. Employee caregivers are representing across occupational categories and in every industry sector. Fifty four percent are hourly workers. Thirty nine percent are salaried and 15% are self-employed, which goes to some of Kristin’s stats. And that percentage is higher for non-caregiving employers in terms of self-employment. They are represented across gender, age and racial and ethnic groups. The groups that are overrepresented compared to their counterparts are women, middle-aged and older employee caregivers, African-Americans and Latino employees. And with the exception of younger employee caregivers, these are the caregivers who are more often in higher intensity caregiving roles and have access to fewer workplace resources and supports.
Ed: Karen, I want to ask you about the Working While Caring pilot program. I do want to note for listeners if they are not familiar with SHERM, it’s the Society for Human Resource Management and some people may know that and some people may not. But I wonder if you could talk about the pilot program. Why it was started and talk about the model you chose and why you did that.
KK: Working While Caring is designed to advance three objectives towards two goals. The first is to raise awareness of employee caregivers amongst employers. The second is to begin to fill in the huge gaps in what is impeccably understood about effective strategies for employee caregivers. Again, we define effectiveness in this way helping employee caregivers stay attached to the labor force and recognized and supported in their caregiving role such that the strain of balancing work and care is reduced. And No. 3, to educate and engage employers on that broader context of care so we know employers can do more to support employee caregivers, but they cannot address all of the effects stemming from such a fragmented system. So, for example, connecting the dots between what they see in their workforce and the lack of long-term care financing. The wages of the direct care workforce. Administrative barriers to access these services and insurances or as Annie Lowery puts it the time tax. And these objectives are geared toward two goals. Over time is to identify and expand access to effective employer supports and number 2 support employers in engaging in changing the systems. Policy reform at the local, state and national levels such as they have been involved in healthcare reform and mental health parody.
We engage small and midsize employers in industry sectors with workflow and operations that cannot be done remotely such as hospitality, retail, large segments of healthcare, manufacturing. These employers do not often have the same resources infrastructure or capacity as larger firms to focus attention on this issue. They are dealing with a number of competing issues and this one often gets crowded out. However, they employ half of the U.S. workforce and while there is little empirical evidence on effective supports for employee caregivers regardless of the type of organization they are employed within what does exist such as toolkits, promising interventions, paid leave and flexibility policies. These are not aligned with the work operations of small and midsize businesses and organizations. So, there’s little guidance data or research that can help them consider options. And so, while they again while they understand the effects of providing care and absenteeism, presenteeism, recruitment and retention, again this issue gets crowded out and is rarely prioritized.
I just want to also say we are focused on workers who are paid hourly working shifts are often frontline and those in occupational categories that have access to fewer employer benefits and accommodations. So, one of our assumptions is that employers are more likely to change the structure and culture of the workplace to strengthen supports for employee caregivers when they are convened to work with their peers to build and pilot test interventions that meet their specific workflow and operational needs. So, we also engage employers in specific geographic areas because the local context of home and community-based services and supports, the healthcare system, transportation and other social determinants of health will affect the development of any interventions that they might design. And then further through collective engagement and convening power, employers can help to really change and strengthen the local service delivery to benefit employee caregivers.
Ed: Kristin, let me switch over and talk about your area of focus. What kind of feedback have you gotten when you talked to the different people who are involved in that part of the economy, what are you hearing from them about portable benefits?
KS: Are you talking about Ed, when we talked to worker themselves?
Ed: I’m interested in workers and then we can talk a little bit about the policy people. But I’m interested in kind of what you hear from workers.
KS: First and foremost, being an independent worker through a digital platform in particular offers sort of a set of flexibility principles that aren’t possible in a traditional 9 to 5 or traditional sort of hourly job and that is the ability to work, when, where, how often and whether you want to, at the touch of a button. And that flexibility is the thing that workers over and over again say that they want to maintain and strengthen. You know its somewhere between like 75 to 85% of app based workers saying they want to maintain their ability to be independent contractors and so with that, when you hear numbers like that, you recognize its (inaudible) that need to take the next steps to start thinking about what does it look like to put the infrastructure in place for people who want to work in a nontraditional way.
So, I think that big picture there’s been a lot of interest in nontraditional structures for supporting workers whatever that looks like. People are just starting to understand or think about how you start setting up, the kinds of retirement accounts and savings accounts in a nontraditional way and the more creativity that we can have in that the better it will be for workers.
Ed: Let me go a little further along the policy line and I’m wondering what kinds of challenges you see in getting support for policies that help in this area and I guess I always have to ask is this a partisan issue.
KS: You know that’s a great question and we have found it not to be a partisan issue for the most part. We spend a lot of time at Flex just you know providing basic background information about the number of people who are working in a nontraditional way. I think lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are frequently surprised that that’s the case. There is upwards you know of 25% growing towards a third or even 40% of workers who earn some amount of their income through a nontraditional, non-W-2 job. If that’s the case, there’s real interest in what are we doing to support people who think of themselves as entrepreneurial and are wanting to be entrepreneurial in the way that they earn income. What was the second part of your question?
Ed: In terms of what kind of challenges, you see in getting support for policies that are going to help backup this portable benefit approach.
KS: Yeah, and again, I think it’s really more awareness than lack of support. There are a number of states that are experimenting with what it would look like to provide nontraditional benefits. We don’t have enough information yet to say hey we have to do it this way through a particular approach. We but there’s real interest and curiosity with lawmakers right now in what would it look like to continue helping people who want to have more than one source of income who want to combine traditional work with nontraditional work who are looking at the app-based platform world or digital platforms in general as sort of the launch point for being a small business owner and being a business entrepreneur in general. Like what do we do about that and how can we start thinking about it.
Ed: Thanks, Kristin. I think you are right that the best policy starts from a broad understanding of the challenges. Karen, let me ask you about the policy piece related to benefits that might offer better support to the millions of people with caregiving responsibilities in this country. As I understand it, your effort is more on the exploratory phase trying to understand what works.
TM: 36:11
KK: To be honest, we don’t have a set of policies that we are promoting at this moment because we don’t know yet what is effective to keep someone attached to the labor force, reduce the strain of balancing both work and care and that can fit within the parameters of a small or a midsize business. So let me see if I can give you a more concrete example perhaps. So paid family and medical leave. It’s a really, really important tool to have and it should be more widely available to workers in this country both for one’s own medical condition, caring for somebody or the birth or adoption of a child. However, it is one tool and for many mid and smaller businesses, it is very difficult to implement not necessarily because of costs, but because they have work to do. They have a mission to fulfill and when you have one person out and you can’t replace that person, it becomes that much more difficult. So, what we are trying to do is get in there with employers and understand their workflow, their operations and their workforce and what else might work. So for example, we talk about job redundancy which again is not an easy solution always, but it would build in some additional capacity into a team so that if someone does have to go out if it’s for a longer period of time, a shorter period of time, intermittently, there is somebody else there who can fulfill the activities that get the product made, get the service done and get the mission fulfilled. That’s just one example.
Or to think more creatively about how you might introduce more scheduling control and flexibility in ways that helps to meet the workflow of that particular business but also meets the needs and the preferences of the worker who is providing care. So, in the example of our pilot with 5 employers in Michigan, they determined that what they wanted to look at is two things. One, how difficult it is for people to find the resources and the supports they need in a timely manner for the care recipient in that sort of broader community and No. 2, how could they think about reducing the psychological strain of balancing both roles within the workplace. So, what they decided to do is to design and we are halfway through this process to design a navigation program that would help their employee caregivers. They would share this navigator or set of navigators. Help that person find the resources that they need. Also to be a liaison with sort of internal HR and managers and supervisors to help that person figure out how they might best also remain at work and provide care. And then really importantly, this would be somebody who has a deep expertise in the experience of care so could meet an employee caregiver where they are such that the person wouldn’t have to explain all of the details all over again but really focus on problem solving.
Ed: As we wrap up here, I’d like to ask both of you what you would like our listeners to take away from this conversation and Kristin why don’t you go ahead first.
TM: 39:44
KS: Thank you so much, Ed. It’s really been a pleasure to talk to you today. My takeaway from this would be that people choose app-based work for any number of reasons from caretaking responsibilities as we’ve discussed to wanting financial support for a new goal to being a military spouse that is constantly on the move or to just wanting to run your own income streams and be your own boss. So, our goal as a country and policymakers are thinking about this should be a support that kind of entrepreneurial spark and provide workers with the best opportunities to earn income on their own terms across the board.
Ed: Karen, how about for you. What would you like people to take away from this discussion when it comes to benefits and caregivers?
KK: So, Ed, I would love for every state to have a number of innovation labs of small and midsized employers perhaps funded through departments of labor. I know there are different names in different states. Here in Michigan, it’s Michigan Economic Development Agency. And it wouldn’t take that much money to fund pilots to really understand what is the prevalence? What is the type of care that workers are providing. What do the businesses struggle with and then get in there and design some interventions, implement them, test them and then also understand how those interventions or how the challenges that employer caregivers are experiencing how those interact with the local context of services, healthcare systems and then see might you be able to collectively the employers and state agencies and legislators look at solutions within that geographic area that could benefit caregivers both those who are employed and those who are not. I would just like to end with Mrs. Carter’s quote that many people have heard, but it’s a lovely quote that is worth saying over and over again and she said many years ago there are only 4 types of people in the world – those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers and those who will need caregivers. So, all of us.
Ed: Well, I want to thank both of you. I think this is an area of the economy that a lot of people don’t’ think about and as you’ve both demonstrated it’s a pretty large area of the economy. An awful lot of people involved so I thank you both for explaining that to us and take care.
KK: Thank you so much, Ed, for having me and elevating this issue.
Ed: I’ve been talking with John Scott, Karen Kavanaugh and Kristin Sharp about the changing workforce and how the worker benefit structure is evolving. Thanks for listening.
You can check out all the podcasts from the National Conference of State Legislatures by searching for NCSL podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast “Our American States” dives into some of the most challenging public policy issues facing legislators. On “Across the Aisle” host Kelley Griffin tells stories of bipartisanship. Also check out our special series “Building Democracy” on the history of legislatures.