Lyft did not respond to requests for comment about the proposed legislation. An Uber spokesperson said that the company is “broadly supportive of improving flexible work options and modernizing worker protections at both the state and federal level.”

Some progressive groups haven’t focused on how to provide benefits for gig economy workers because they have been putting their energy toward the question of whether workers should be classified as employees or independent contractors, Andy Stern, the former president of the 2.2 million–member Service Employees International Union, told me. Controversy over the Independent Drivers’ Guild is a case in point: Many workers’ groups criticized the formation of the guild last year because it stopped short of being a union, which meant it had less negotiating power with ride-sharing companies. But arguing over workers’ status obscures the fact that these workers need benefits, Stern argues. “By being so politically pure, we sometimes shoot ourselves in the foot,” he said.

More and more Americans are working in these type of gig-economy jobs. Between 2005 and 2015, the share of workers engaged in “alternative work,” meaning they were on-call workers, temp workers, contract workers, or freelancers, jumped from 11 to 16 percent, according to a paper by Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard, and Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton. They calculate that 60 percent of net job growth in that time was due to the rise of independent contractors, freelancers, and contract-company workers.

Yet legislative solutions may leave some of these workers behind. If progressive cities like New York City and states like Seattle and New Jersey pass laws giving benefits to gig-economy workers, a patchwork system will emerge in which workers in some cities are better protected than others. This dynamic already exists, to some degree, around the country. Certain cities have passed higher minimum-wage ordinances, for example, while in other cities, conservative state legislators have rolled back efforts to increase the minimum wage. In St. Louis, for example, because of a new state law, the minimum wage will be rolled back to $7.70 from $10 an hour, even though the city had tried to raise it to $10. The minimum wage in San Francisco, by contrast, is $14 an hour, meaning that people flipping burgers on the coast could make nearly twice as much as those in St. Louis. “There’s been this attempt to re-govern the market from below in cities where there’s enough of a base to pass these laws,” Janice Fine, a labor law professor at Rutgers, told me.

Of course, this dynamic of workers being protected in some places in the country and not others has played out throughout American history, but this history also indicates that state- and city-level efforts may someday make their way across the country. In the 1870s, for example, states like Massachusetts passed factory health and safety laws and established teams of inspectors who would enforce the laws, while other states dallied on passing such laws. But Massachusetts’ actions led to a movement nationwide. As a U.S. Bureau of Labor investigator, W.F. Willoughby, wrote, “A movement at first grows slowly, but as State after State adopts similar measures the pressure upon others to do likewise becomes stronger.” Such influence may not be as strong in the polarized America of today, where states often have opposite visions about the role of government in protecting workers. And even if states still do influence each other on matters of protecting workers, progress could take a while: After Massachusetts passed its law, other states followed, but no national laws protecting factory workers were passed for nearly half a century.

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