In the us, we lump workers into two categories, employee or independent contractor, neither of which were designed for Fasil Teka. Teka, 41, joined Uber five years ago in Seattle. He drives roughly 40 hours a week as an independent contractor. He’s also a party planner and sometimes shuttles guests for a local hotel. Teka loves the flexibility of having multiple gigs and driving only when he wants. When one income source wanes, another waxes. But the risks are mounting. He missed the 2014 deadline to sign up for Obamacare and had to do without health insurance. And last New Year’s Eve his car got totaled, knocking him off of Uber for three weeks until he leased a new one. Most frustrating for Teka, Uber changes his fare rates frequently and with little warning. “Uber treats us as employees,” Teka says—except, of course, with none of the benefits and protections of a traditional job, like the ability to negotiate fare prices through union representation or collect unemployment if Uber drops him.

A growing number of people like Teka are turning to software platforms to find flexible work. Five years after Uber launched, it now supports 400,000 drivers. That’s a tiny number compared with the total 157 million workers in the US. But these kinds of companies are popping up across every industry, from housecleaning (Handy) to short-term rentals (Airbnb) to drafting legal contracts (UpCounsel). The gig economy is a bellwether for a broader shift to an Internet-powered workforce. “Vast sectors of our economy could change quickly,” says Michelle Miller, who cofounded the worker advocacy platform Coworker.org. “You could imagine that 25 years from now, whole industries are managed on a software platform.”

In short, work is changing; the protections we offer workers must change as well. And while some of that change is being hashed out in the courts as workers file lawsuits seeking to be reclassified as employees, it’s not enough to help the US economy prepare for the future. Regardless of how these suits are resolved, they still group workers into categories designed for a 20th-century workforce, in which most people spent their careers employed by one large company. Increasingly, work doesn’t work that way. We need smart regulation that will define new categories for workers—or at least offer better protection within existing categories. It’s as critical to startups, which need to ensure a healthy labor supply, as it is to people like Teka.

In Seattle, the city council has proposed legislation that would allow drivers like Teka to bargain collectively. Independent contractors are not covered by the federal National Labor Relations Act, which enables employees to negotiate directly with companies. However, there is precedent for states to let them organize. “Farmworkers in California are not employees and couldn’t legally be represented, but the state passed a law so they could be covered,” says Teamsters organizer Dawn Gearhart, who is leading the Seattle effort—the first of its kind in the country to target gig-economy workers. While Uber would likely sue if the reform is passed, legal experts believe there’s a good chance the courts would let the law stand, providing a model for the rest of the country.

“A growing number of people are turning to software platforms to find flexible work.”

Some, including US senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia), have suggested piloting an “hour bank,” a program used in construction to administer benefits like health care and disability for members who work for multiple contractors. However, gig-economy companies have so far shied away from any moves that could be construed as providing traditional benefits to contractors out of fear they will be sued.

Other reformers hold up the Affordable Care Act, which provides independent workers with a path to decently priced health care, as a model for other types of benefits. The ACA has resulted in a surge in the number of insured. (According to MBO Partners, which provides back-office support for independent contractors, a survey of those professionals showed that 82 percent had health care in 2015, up from 64 percent in 2013.) Indeed, Teka says he will sign up this year.

Meanwhile, some legal experts advocate a third regulatory category for workers in which they’d be responsible for some costs (like, say, making payments into a workers’ compensation fund) but not others (like health care contributions). “An intermediate category could be part of the solution,” says New York University law professor Cynthia Estlund. In Canada, for example, some individuals who rely only on a single employer are called dependent contractors. They can be eligible for reasonable notice of termination or compensation to make up for it.

None of these suggestions is the solution on its own, but together they represent the most forward-thinking approaches to ensuring the next century’s workers and businesses are protected. Eighty years ago, the New Deal was intended to establish economic security for both, giving rise to the American middle class. We must act quickly and thoughtfully to create our century’s version of this legislation, for the future of Teka—and Uber.

Jessi Hempel (@jessiwrites) is senior staff writer at WIRED.