Uber's CEO called the 40-hour benefits rule 'the old world' back in 2020. Six years later nothing has replaced it for 1099 workers

In the spring of 2020, the chief executive of the largest gig platform in the country said the plainest thing anyone in his position has said about the work.

He said the structure around it was obsolete.

Dara Khosrowshahi was talking to CNBC about how drivers should be paid and covered. He did not hedge it.

"I think this system of if you don't work 40 hours, you're not full-time, if you work 40 hours, you're full-time, and then there's this hard break between the two, that's the old world," he said in a May 2020 interview with CNBC. "If you're putting in the hours, you should get minimum earnings based on the hours that you're working and you should get health-care based on the hours that you're working."

That is the head of a company describing the benefits system as a relic — and he was right about the diagnosis. What has not happened in the six years since is the cure.

You are not a chief executive, but you live inside the gap he described

Here is the part that matters to your own money.

The old world he described had a deal buried inside it. Cross the 40-hour line and an employer handed you a plan: a 401(k), a match, automatic payroll deductions you never had to think about. Stay below the line, or work outside the line entirely as a contractor, and you got nothing on that side of the ledger.

Portable benefits were supposed to fix that. Some progress has been made on health coverage and paid leave in a handful of states. On retirement, nothing moved. No gig platform enrolls 1099 contractors in a retirement plan, because enrolling them would look a great deal like employing them.

So the portable retirement account — the one that follows you between apps, between clients, between good years and bad ones — is the one you go out and open. For most self-employed people that is a Solo 401(k).

The scale of the gap is bigger than rideshare

This is not a driver problem. It is a classification problem, and the classification is spreading.

The Federal Reserve's survey of household economics in 2024 found that 20% of American adults did gig work in the prior month, up from 16% in 2021. That is one adult in five with at least some income that arrives without a plan attached to it.

The same survey found something that explains why the gap persists even among people who want to close it: 59% of self-employed adults said their income varied month to month, against 28% of people working for someone else.

An employer plan is built for the 28%. It assumes a steady paycheck, a fixed percentage, and a payroll system that moves money before you see it. None of those assumptions hold for someone whose January and June are different businesses.

What "portable" was supposed to mean

The word portable did a lot of work in that 2020 argument, and it is worth being precise about it, because the retirement version already exists and most people do not realise it.

Portable means the account belongs to the person, not the job. Nothing about it is contingent on which app you are logged into this month. If you drive for two platforms and freelance on the side, the same account takes contributions from all three. If you quit gig work entirely and take a salaried job next year, the account comes with you and keeps growing.

That is a genuinely better arrangement than the one an employee gets, and it is easy to miss because it arrives with no announcement and no HR portal. An employee's plan is tied to an employer; when they leave, they have paperwork to do. A self-employed person's plan was never tied to anyone.

It also stacks. You can have a Solo 401(k) for your 1099 work while participating in an employer plan at a W-2 job, though the employee deferral limit is shared across both and you have to track it yourself. Nobody will track it for you, which is the recurring theme of this entire subject.

What actually closes it

Open the account nobody is going to open for you. A Solo 401(k) is usually the larger container for self-employment income. In 2026 you can put away up to $72,000 across the employee and employer sides, or $80,000 if you are 50 or older, with the employee deferral capped at $24,500. Because the deferral portion is a flat dollar amount rather than a percentage of profit, it often lets a moderate earner shelter far more than a percentage-based plan would.

Or take the simpler one. A SEP IRA has no plan document to adopt and no annual filing until the plan gets large, and you can fund it right up to your filing deadline including extensions. The trade-off is that the whole contribution is employer-side, roughly 20% of net self-employment earnings, so at lower income levels the ceiling is lower. Compare the two side by side before you commit, or read how a SEP IRA works on its own.

Fund it the way your income actually arrives. Neither account demands a fixed monthly contribution. That is the single feature that makes them fit irregular earnings: you can put in nothing for four months and a large lump in December once you can see what the year did. Size it in the calculator first rather than guessing.

Know what you are paying and to whom. Any account you open has a cost structure sitting under it, and you should be able to read it in one page. Ours is written out here.

The honest reading

A chief executive said in 2020 that the hard line between full-time and part-time belonged to a previous era. He was describing a benefits system that no longer matches how tens of millions of people earn.

He was correct, and the correction never came. What did not change is that the tax code gives self-employed people more room to save than almost any employee gets — but only if someone opens the account, and the only person positioned to do that is you.

Gigaverse is pursuing registration as an investment adviser with the SEC and is not currently registered. This article is education, not investment advice, and it is not a recommendation of any particular account for your situation. Accounts are held through a FINRA/SIPC-member broker-dealer. We have no affiliation with Uber or any person quoted here, and none of them endorse Gigaverse.