Senator Elizabeth Warren has a knack for recognizing the challenges facing ordinary Americans years before the rest of the political world gets there. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was an idea she generated as a Harvard law professor in mid-2007, when the housing market was just beginning to melt down. She was well out in front on the need to reinstitute the firewall between commercial and investment banking, a cause taken up in the presidential primaries by Bernie Sanders.

So when Warren turned her attention on Thursday to the atomized American workplace and what I have called the 1099 economy, it was a huge moment. It signaled that the question of how to rebuild the safety net for a twenty-first-century work environment is now poised to be the dominant topic for American liberalism in the next decade.

At the New America Foundation’s annual conference in Washington, Warren gave a speech called “Strengthening the Basic Bargain for Workers in the Modern Economy.” American workers, she pointed out, have already fought for and won the ability to work a 40-hour week at a living wage in a safe workplace—with compensation if you get hurt, unemployment insurance if you get fired, Social Security when you retire, and a union to help with your grievances. These innovations “helped make sure that part of the increased wealth generated by innovation would be used to build a strong middle class,” Warren noted.

We shouldn’t have to wage those battles again. But we do: The classifying of employees as temps or freelancers, “permalancers” or independent contractors or gig workers, necessitates it. The structure of employment law that served the nation over the past eight decades is fraying, shot through with loopholes that employers use to their advantage to shortchange workers. For example, President Obama’s new overtime rule will help millions of salaried workers who currently don’t receive extra pay when they work more than 40 hours a week. But it does nothing for freelancers.

Progressive and New Deal-era employment law arose from the Gilded Age’s exploitation of workers powering the Industrial Revolution. There’s nothing new about modifying the rules to accommodate new technologies, so workers can share in the wealth produced by them. There’s also nothing new about a “gig economy” service like Uber: Long before anybody knew what an app was, employers were moving to classifying their workers as independent contractors to shirk their responsibilities.