Public Service Innovators -- Sara Horowitz (MPA '95) Benefits the Independent Workforce

A regular paycheck. A comprehensive benefits package. Especially in a recession, employees cling dearly to company-provided comforts. Yet, since long before the current recession, there's been a growing breed of worker who's learned to do without. In September, Sara Horowitz (MPA '95) launched the Portable Benefits Network to provide much-needed insurances to independent workers.

Daughter of a union-side labor lawyer and granddaughter of a union organizer, Horowitz is the next generation of labor leadership-organizing the next generation of worker. "My association with unionism...it wasn't a revelation," Horowitz admits. But her plans to empower the independent workforce and to build what she calls "the new New Deal" are revolutionary.

Horowitz was working as a union-side lawyer when she first recognized that independent workers were falling outside the New Deal safety net. "The laws are so much about a big factory/industrial setting," she says. "That's just not the way people are working."

With information technology enabling smarter, shorter-term decision-making, employers are hiring on an as-needed basis. This trend has fostered a rise in part-timers, freelancers, contractors, and temps. Today, independent workers comprise thirty percent of the workforce and span the economic spectrum.

Recognizing free agents as a fact of the new economy, in 1995, Horowitz founded Working Today, a nonprofit organization that provides advocacy, education, and service for independent workers. Meeting with workers, Horowitz quickly learned that their biggest issue-after finding work-was health insurance. "That became the central thing, because that was such a huge need," she says.

Horowitz is addressing that need with the creation of the Portable Benefits Network, which offers health, life, and disability benefits at small group rates. She hopes the service will not only makes insurances more affordable, but will help thousands of independent workers make educated benefit decisions.

Even as the service is being piloted with a group of twenty-seven IT-affiliated organizations, associations, and unions in New York City, Horowitz is conducting feasibility tests to expand the service to low income workers. She's also working to deepen relationships with her existing partners. "They need...tools so that they can build their membership and, at the same time, provide the services people really need."

A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "genius award" in 2000, Horowitz speaks of the infrastructure she's created with a mix of pride and ambition. "We total 75,000 people in New York City," she says of her partnering organizations. "That's the largest constituency of independent workers...in the country. For us, we're just at the beginning."

For more information about Working Today, visit www.workingtoday.org or call 718-222-1099.