DPE Statement on Portable Benefits
September 25, 2026
For decades, unions representing professionals across sectors have negotiated benefit structures that make careers sustainable: multi-employer health funds and pension plans that travel with workers from job to job.
As employers shift toward contingent employment models, more professionals face precarity: unstable income, no employer-sponsored health insurance, lack of retirement savings, and no safety net during gaps in employment. The policy response to this reality has significant consequences, both for the millions of workers it affects and for the labor standards that protect all workers.
Portable benefits proposals are often framed as innovative solutions for nontraditional work arrangements. But many are premised on independent contractor status that would institutionalize misclassification by removing employer obligations, weakening collective bargaining rights, eliminating civil rights and workers’ compensation protections, and locking workers into a second-tier status with little employer accountability. Portable benefits structured this way can make it easier for employers to reclassify workers as independent contractors while giving the appearance that workers are still protected.
The Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO (DPE) supports universal access to healthcare, retirement security, paid leave, and other core protections. The test for any portable benefits proposal should be whether it delivers real security or offers portable benefits in name only. Policymakers should reject frameworks that incentivize or provide cover for misclassification and instead pursue policies that strengthen labor standards, expand universal benefits, and preserve the right to organize.
To that end, DPE supports:
Expanding access to healthcare for workers who lack employer-sponsored coverage;
Multi-employer benefit pools with substantial employer contributions, modeled on established union fund structures;
Rigorous enforcement of worker classification standards to ensure portable benefits cannot be used as a pretext for misclassification;
State and local pilot programs with strong worker oversight, ensuring that unions maintain direct representation and that policy experimentation does not occur at workers’ expense; and
Passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act to expand collective bargaining rights across the workforce.
DPE’s goal is to ensure that every worker, regardless of how their work is structured, has access to the security and rights they deserve.