At least how I see it, many of the problems are that the company is not giving the protections that they've historically supposed to have given. I think one option is to extricate those protections from the employers and bring them to a different level. It could be a union, it could be a local/regional/national/(dare I say global) government, it could be some other org that provides those services. Then the employer could still give the flexibility and not have to worry about providing those extra benefits.