[Themaintainers] OpenCollective offering employment options for maintainers (with health insurance/401(k))

[Sumana Harihareswara]

Open Collective Foundation is a fiscal host that serves many 
initiatives, including nearly three thousand open source software projects.

The Open Collective Foundation has just announced: "OCF now offers 
employment options to initiative workers—with health insurance!" ... 
"Initiatives fiscally hosted by OCF can have employees, with access to 
benefits like health insurance. Costs related to employment are paid 
from the initiative's budget, with OCF as the employer." And through the 
OCF's benefits provider, employees can also opt into 401(k) retirement 
savings plans. 
https://docs.opencollective.foundation/what-we-offer/employment

This is such a huge step forward for open source sustainability, in 
particular for projects with maintainers in the United States. I discuss 
why in my new blog post 
https://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2021/11/24/0 . In order to explain 
why (especially for a non-US audience), I summarize how strange and 
deficient the US is in how we deal with healthcare and retirement-type 
care for senior citizens, and how this is tied to employment.

> Your open source software project, once you're set up as a member project at a fiscal host, can now receive and spend funds. Great! So you can register domains, buy AWS credits and laptops and plane tickets, pay contractors...
> 
> Right, yes, you can compensate people for their labor, but in the US, the WAY you compensate them gets complicated. Because it's fairly easy to hire someone as a contractor ("freelancer"), but hard to hire them as an employee. And to talk about the difference I need to talk about how weird the United States is. In short: being hired as a "full-time" employee (usually at least 30 hours of work per week) usually gets a knowledge worker (such as a programmer) a lot of concrete benefits that would be unavailable, inconvenient, or more expensive if they were hired as a contractor, in particular concerning health care and saving for retirement.
-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Changeset Consulting
https://changeset.nyc