I’m writing this as an HR practitioner and a curious American, trying to understand how we built a system where access to food and healthcare depends on having a job. 

Right now, the government is shut down over a debate about whether to continue federal subsidies that prevent millions of Americans who buy insurance on the marketplace from facing sky-high premiums. That’s the headline. What else is this story about?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between work and worth. In modern society, employment has become the main gateway to meeting our most basic needs. In the US, your ability to see a doctor or feed your family often depends on whether someone employs you.

This is most visible in healthcare. During open enrollment season, especially amid uncertainty around federal subsidies, it’s worth pausing to understand the structure we live within and how access to essentials like healthcare is tied to employment.

Most Americans get health insurance through an employer. For people who are unemployed, self-employed, or between jobs, coverage usually costs more and offers less: higher premiums, narrower networks, fewer doctors to choose from. Employer-based plans are cheaper largely because large groups can spread risk and negotiate rates. The marketplace was designed to help close that gap, but only with government subsidies.

If those subsidies expire after 2025, many families will face steep premium increases, while employer coverage remains relatively stable. We’ve been hearing this story for weeks. Beneath it lies a more fundamental question: What does this design reveal about what we believe gives someone worth?

Embedded in this system is a deeper story, one that ties affordable care and often dignity itself to the state of being employed. As the nature of work evolves and technology transforms what 'employability' means, we need to look closely at how we define worth, and at the roles employability and HR play in shaping access to stability.

How We Built This System

During World War II, wage controls limited how much employers could pay. To attract workers, they began offering health insurance as a benefit. Post-war tax incentives cemented that model, and by the 1960s, the US had effectively privatized much of its social safety net through the workplace.

This approach eventually extended to retirement savings, disability coverage, and paid leave. Government programs like minimum wage, unemployment insurance, family leave, and the ACA set a baseline, but beyond that, employers shape many of the conditions that define daily life.

While other countries share this responsibility between public systems and employers, the US relies heavily on work-based benefits to deliver what many nations treat as public goods. It was designed that way.

As a result, being an employer carries extraordinary influence and responsibility. Yet benefits are still too often viewed as perks or labor costs, rather than as part of a social structure that millions depend on.

The Employer Paradox

The US economy is built on capitalism, where employment is a means to an end: a way to produce goods, services, and profit. What often goes unacknowledged is how much social responsibility we’ve layered onto the act of employing itself.

Employers have become the gatekeepers of healthcare, income stability, and other essentials, whether they see this as part of their mission or not. That contradiction is becoming harder to ignore as companies explore automation and AI, often signaling a smaller need for human labor.

If our safety net runs through employers, but many employers view employing people as secondary to maximizing profit, it exposes how little we acknowledge the responsibility we’ve placed in their hands, and how thoroughly we’ve neglected it elsewhere.

It also reminds us that while we work within these constraints, we must still imagine and design toward what else is possible.

The Responsibility HR Carries

HR professionals and leaders shape how people access healthcare, paid leave, and the time and space to heal or care for a loved one. Regulation sets a floor, but every organization chooses how high to build above it. Those choices reveal what the organization truly believes about people and what kind of culture and even society it helps create.

That power is easy to overlook amid budgets and business goals, but it’s profound. Every policy becomes part of the unspoken social contract between employer and employee: an agreement about what people deserve, not only because they work here, but because they work at all.

When HR and leadership share the belief that people are central to success, the work becomes transformative. How we compensate, care for, and support people doesn’t just affect operations; it shapes motivation, performance, and trust. I’ve worked with some incredible organizations that hold these beliefs.

At its best, HR builds systems that serve both the organization and its people, structures that are sustainable for business and respectful of the humans within it. Employers may not have asked for this role, but it’s the one in front of us.

That, to me, is the opportunity of modern HR: to design work experiences that honor this responsibility and help both people and organizations thrive.

The Tension Within HR

HR carries a dual mandate: to represent employees while advancing organizational strategy. We are tasked with advocating for a workforce and ensuring the sustainability of the business. Balancing those aims requires constant learning, negotiation, and creativity. I will always stand by the belief that HR is a creative role.

I’ve reflected deeply on how my own values shape the way I navigate this tension. Over time, I’ve come to see more clearly the politics of HR: the quiet balance between people’s needs, organizational realities, and the public systems we all operate within.

It’s taught me that HR is as much about how we value people as it is about designing systems, and that both can work hand in hand toward strategy. The best people practices create coherence between what an organization believes and how it treats people.

The Way Forward

As I think about where we go from here, I see both fragility and possibility in the systems we’ve built. Work will likely remain central to how people contribute and find purpose, and I hope it does, because collective work toward shared purpose within organizations is vital to human flourishing. But access to basic needs should never depend on it.

Within that reality, HR and organizational leaders have an opportunity to hold this responsibility with care, to build thoughtfully within the structures in front of us, and to imagine what better could look like.

That’s the standard I hold for myself, and for our field: to keep designing toward what’s possible and to remember that a person’s worth has never depended on their work.