When animals flock together, we use strange collective names to describe them. You’ve heard of a flock of seagulls, a pod of whales, and a murder of crows. But did you know the collective nouns for apes, hippos, and wildebeests?
Fortunately, this wildlife writer does. It’s a shrewdness of apes, a bloat of hippopotamuses, and a confusion of wildebeests.
My favorite, though, is a parliament of owls. The phrase was apparently coined by CS Lewis in the 1950s and stuck. Good for the owls! I wish for them to form a strong government and pass wise laws.
When independent contractors flock together, we don’t really have a good word for that. Contractors generally can’t flock together for employee benefit plans since they’re not employees, even though some states have enacted portable benefits laws as models for what may be viable on a national level.
One impediment to companies providing contractors with benefits is that doing so can be evidence of an employment relationship. Companies are perversely incentivized not to help contractors remain self-sufficient because companies don’t want to risk misclassification claims.
That could change with a national portable benefits bill.
There has been interest for a long time among trade associations and small business groups to allow portable healthcare and retirement benefits for independent contractors. A recently released white paper by Sen. Bill Cassidy, Chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, advocates for a national portable benefits bill.
The white paper proposes various options for providing affordable health care options for independent contractors, including association health plans, health reimbursement arrangements, pooled employer plans, and single employee pension IRAs. For these programs to work, Congress would have to ensure that a company’s participation in such plans is not a factor in determining whether the contractor receiving such benefits is misclassified.
The concept of portable benefits for contractors is one that should have bipartisan support. The main obstacle to such a bill is likely the desire by some for contractors to receive all of the benefits of employees, and so this concept (for them) is only half a loaf.
Once upon a time, we used to have a Congress that would consider half a loaf to be better than no loaf at all. My hope is that legislators will find a way to make this concept work.
It would be wise. Something that a parliament of owls could probably get done.
© 2025 Todd Lebowitz, posted on WhoIsMyEmployee.com, Exploring Issues of Independent Contractor Misclassification and Joint Employment. All rights reserved.
