Mechele Dickerson

And he was never going to get 40 hours a week working at the DSP because it wasn't set up for them to be full-time, 40-hour a week.

You got to give them benefits.

Well, several states have actually tried.

I think California tried, all have failed, but several states have tried.

Basically, if you have someone that is doing the same work that people you called employees are doing,

Those people must be treated like employees, whether you call them contractors or not.

So give them health insurance, allow them to participate in the retirement plans, and more importantly, allow them to organize and to participate in any union organizing attempts at your company.

Because at the end of the day,

When you have fewer employees, your costs are less as a business, and you're not at great of a risk of having a strong union presence.

Because if you have fewer employees, you're less likely to have to deal with those pesky unions.

I would say we need to make a radical change.

And these are a couple of options.

And I'll lead into this by telling a story involving a class that I taught at UT.

So it was a class that had both law students, public policy students, students from the School of Education and foreign exchange students.

So we were talking about the middle class and this particular class session, we were talking about insurance.

And one of the students from the Netherlands finally asked a question.

She says, I don't understand why when we're talking about health insurance, you all keep talking about jobs.

What do jobs have to do with anything?

And then we had to explain to her, well, in the U.S., that's how we provide health insurance.

So if we leave it with businesses...