Helen hasn’t taken a day off in weeks. Since the novel coronavirus crisis began, she’s taken countless trips to the grocery store as an Instacart shopper, ferrying bags of food to people for what amounts to a little more than minimum wage. Recently, a group of Instacart shoppers staged a nationwide strike, demanding that the company provide higher wages, along with benefits like hazard pay and sick leave. Helen supports those demands but says she “literally couldn’t afford to take the day off.” (She asked not to use her last name for fear of retaliation.) It’s not just out-of-pocket payments for gas, car insurance, and all the rest. She also has to pay for her own health insurance and dip into her savings to take a sick day. “I’m just saving as much as possible during the feast, because I know it’ll be back to famine soon enough.”

The gig economy has been like this for years, with some workers scrambling to make ends meet sans traditional benefits. And it’s not just gig workers. While on-demand jobs represent a small sliver of the economy, Gallup estimates that as many as one-third of Americans rely on alternative work arrangements, piecing together a paycheck from various clients or customers.

Now, as the Covid-19 crisis worsens, Americans seem to appreciate the value of these workers more than ever—especially couriers like Helen, who have become a lifeline for people stuck at home. Delivery workers have been called “household heroes.” Cities on lockdown have classified their work as “essential.” That’s thrown into stark relief the nature of their work and their lack of protections like health care, sick leave, workers’ compensation, and stable pay. Americans are paying unprecedented attention to gig workers. If ever there was a time to secure those benefits, it’s now.

“We are absolutely at a fork in the road,” says Palak Shah, the founding director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which has fought to provide comprehensive benefits to domestic workers. “The conversation is at a turning point now, where we’re shifting from talking about the ‘future of work’ to realizing it’s not about the future. It has to change right now.”

Benefits like unemployment insurance arose in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression. Employer-sponsored health insurance came later, as did federal requirements to give employees time off for family and medical leave. These systems provide a safety net to people who work, but they reflect the needs of a 20th-century workforce, when far more people worked for one employer for most of their career. Today, tens of millions of people with nontraditional work arrangements are left out.

"With the coronavirus crisis, I think we’re going to see public opinion change very quickly." Palak Shah, National Domestic Workers Alliance

Some parts of the workforce have gone without traditional benefits for decades, long before “the gig economy” existed: house cleaners, nannies, plumbers, electricians, tutors, and even real estate agents, many of whom are self-employed or lack a full-time employer who would administer benefits. “There’s a lot of commonality between someone who’s driving for Uber and someone who’s working as a tutor, or a subcontracted worker who’s providing cleaning services for Google,” says Alastair Fitzpayne, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Future of Work Initiative. “Those workers have slightly different work arrangements, but their inability to access benefits is very similar.”

When the economy ground to a halt in 2008, most people without W-2 jobs didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits because they couldn’t claim an employer who had paid unemployment taxes. Now, legislators have temporarily changed that policy, allowing freelancers and self-employed individuals to claim unemployment benefits for the first time. Fitzpayne believes that’s at least partly owing to the recent visibility of gig workers. “It’s raised awareness that if you’re going to provide unemployment insurance benefits, and you only apply it for people who have traditional employers, you’ll leave out tens of millions of people.”