This company offers its contract workers benefits and job security

Millions of Americans are quitting their jobs and rethinking what they want when it comes to work and work-life balance. Companies are responding, meeting their employees’ needs in areas like remote work, flexible hours, four-day workweeks, compensation and more. This story is part of a series looking at the Great Reshuffle and the shift in workplace culture that is taking place right now.

Harriet Talbot dreamed about bicycling across Europe and then on into Australia. Yet to make it happen, she thought she would have to quit her job.

Then, her employer, London-based Unilever, introduced a new program called U-Work that gives employees the flexibility of contract work within the company while still providing benefits and job security.

Workers commit to working a minimum number of weeks a year, receive a small monthly retainer and get paid for assignments. Benefits are not the same as those offered to full-time employees, but include a pension, health insurance and sick pay.

“I didn’t expect that it would be possible to have that ongoing relationship with an employer,” said 30-year-old Talbot, who is based in London.

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Talbot left her full-time job in the consumer-goods company’s global sustainability team in 2021. She then worked two contract jobs at Unilever and had a side gig at a local bike shop.

On Tuesday, she takes off on her trip, which should take almost a year to complete.

“It’s such a kind of real relief and really progressive, I think, to be able to come back and join the Unilever community when I get back,” she said.

Unilever’s United Kingdom office piloted the program in 2019 as a way to help retain workers nearing retirement.

“Very quickly, we realized that it wasn’t just people of that generation who were looking for flexibility, but others too for a variety of reasons, like family care, and study, travel, wanting to work for themselves or work for other organizations,” said Morag Lynagh, Unilever’s global future of work director.

U-Work became a permanent part of Unilever’s U.K. benefits in 2020 and is now being piloted in several other locations, including Argentina, South Africa and the Philippines. It’s yet to reach the United States, although Lynagh said she’d like to make that happen.

“We’re always open to having conversations with any market in the Unilever world that’s interested in taking this forward,” she said. “We’d love to talk to the U.S. if the U.S. wants to do this.”

There are 75 workers either currently active or about to start in the U.K.’s program. They include a member of the legal team who wanted to spend more time with her children and also put in some hours at a friend’s law firm, a factory manager who wanted to phase into retirement and another worker who…