The Fix: How We Rebuild the Deal (Without Waiting for D.C.)
We’ve spent the last three posts diagnosing a problem that everyone in Southwest Washington feels but few people know how to name:
The Ladder is Broken: Entry-level jobs don’t lead to careers anymore.
The Job is Unbundled: We stripped away the benefits and stability that made work "worth it."
The Adult Life is Locked Out: Debt and housing costs have frozen an entire generation in place.
If we stop there, we’re just complaining. And frankly, I’m tired of complaining. I’m interested in building.
We don’t need another federal task force to tell us that childcare is expensive or that small businesses are drowning in healthcare costs. We know. What we need is a new operating system for our local economy—one that works for the 24-year-old crab fisherman, the 45-year-old restaurant owner, and the 60-year-old timber veteran.
That operating system is Prosperity-Works.
The Big Idea: Community Capitalism
Here is the hard truth: A small business in Longview or Ilwaco cannot compete with Amazon or Google on benefits. They just can’t. They don’t have the scale. When a small employer tries to buy health insurance, they get hammered with high rates. When they try to offer a 401(k), the admin fees eat them alive. So they offer what they can, but it’s often not enough to keep young talent from leaving for the city.
Prosperity-Works changes the math by changing the scale. It is a Community-Based Professional Employer Organization (PEO). That sounds technical, but the concept is simple: We take hundreds of small employers across Pacific, Wahkiakum, Cowlitz, Lewis, Skamania, and Clark counties and pool them together into one massive group. Instead of 50 businesses negotiating alone, we negotiate as a block of 500 or 1,000 employees.
Suddenly, the math flips.
Health Insurance: We get "big group" rates, dropping premiums by an estimated 18%.
Workers Comp: We pool the risk and lower costs by 10–35%.
The Result: Employers save roughly 8–14% of their total revenue.
Fixing the "Unbundled" Job
Remember the "unbundled" job I talked about? The one where risk was shoved onto the worker? Prosperity-Works re-bundles it.
Because we operate as a single "Employer of Record" for the region, benefits become portable. This is a game-changer for our seasonal economy. Imagine a worker named Luis.
January: He works the crab season in Westport.
June: He shifts to a busy restaurant in Long Beach.
October: He picks up construction work in Raymond.
In the old system, Luis loses his health insurance three times a year. He never qualifies for a 401(k). He is permanently unstable. In the Prosperity-Works system, Luis never leaves the payroll.. His paycheck comes from Prosperity-Works. His benefits continue uninterrupted. His retirement keeps compounding. He has the stability of a corporate job while doing the local work our community actually needs.
Stopping the Extraction
"But wait," you might ask, "PEOs already exist. Why not just use ADP or Insperity?" Because those are extractive models. When you pay a national PEO, the profit goes to Dallas, New York, or Chicago. It leaves our community and never comes back.
Prosperity-Works is a Public Benefit Corporation paired with a non-profit Foundation. That means the surplus—the profit we make from running this efficient system—doesn’t go to Wall Street. It stays here. And we use it to fix the things the government can't seems to figure out.
1. Funding Childcare Without Taxes Washington businesses lose an estimated $2 billion a year due to employee turnover related to childcare issues. It is the single biggest barrier for working parents. We aren't going to wait for a federal subsidy. We use the surplus from the PEO to subsidize local childcare centers. We treat childcare like infrastructure—just like roads and power lines—because that’s what it is.
2. Google-Level Wellness for Main Street Why should tech workers in Seattle be the only ones with mental health support, gym memberships, and financial coaching? By pooling our resources, Prosperity-Works can fund a Community Wellness program—gym access, mental health counselors, financial literacy classes—for every worker in the network.
The "Founding Employer" Call to Action
This isn't a theory. We have the business plan, the legal structure, and the numbers. But it only works if we build it together.
We are looking for Founding Employers in Pacific County and beyond to launch this. If you run a business and you’re tired of:
Losing good people because you can’t afford benefits.
Spending your weekends doing compliance paperwork instead of growing your business.
Watching your community shrink because young families can’t afford to live here.
Then this is for you. We are offering a way to save money (real, hard dollars) while doing the right thing for your people.
The Bottom Line
We spent 30 years breaking the deal. We unbundled the job. We inflated the debt. We outsourced the risk. We can spend the next 30 years apologizing for it, or we can build a new machine that actually works.
Prosperity-Works is that machine. It is private-sector led. It requires no new taxes. It puts control back in local hands. It turns the "Gig Economy" back into a "Career Economy."
This is how we reignite the American Dream—not by giving speeches about it, but by rebuilding the infrastructure that makes it possible. Let’s get to work.
