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The Black Car Fund

NPR

If you have a full-time job, and you get hurt at work, you are covered by workers' compensation insurance. You can get medical care, and get paid some of your salary while you recover from your injury.

But if you're a contractor — you're freelancer, working in the gig economy, and you get hurt on the job — you are out of luck.

A lot of the social safety net in this country works this way: it's built around full-time employees. But more and more people are working not as full-time employees, but as contractors.

This is problem people are talking about a lot. Today on the show, we talk about a possible solution.

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Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Yuki Noguchi is a correspondent on the Science Desk based out of NPR's headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money, and is a correspondent for Planet Money.