The Work the Law Couldn't See

Two bills. Two categories of invisible labor. One question Colorado is finally beginning to answer.

Two kinds of work. Thirty-two years. The camera and the caregiving household - parallel architectures that the law has never seen as the same problem. "The Work the Law Couldn't See" - Care Futures, April 19, 2026. #ColoradoCAREAct #CareFutures

By Mark Fukae - Director of Advocacy | Professionals Who Care

I've been running camera since 1994.

A film practice built over two decades, erased by a pandemic in March 2020. A government job at 52. A PERA pension beginning to accumulate. The parallel architecture I had been building toward without fully naming it.

I don't say this as complaint. I say it as diagnostic. The work and the survival have always been two different problems. What the pandemic exposed is that the creative economy has no legal architecture for structural shocks - and the caregiving economy has no legal architecture at all.

Two weeks ago, a bipartisan bill cleared the Colorado Senate Business, Labor and Technology Committee 5-0 and now sits in Senate Appropriations. SB26-133 - the Colorado Artist Company Act - is the first business entity in American history designed specifically for how artists actually work: mandatory ownership, reversionary IP rights, mission protected by statute. Not a subsidy. A structure.

At the same time, I am building the Colorado CARE Act - proposed for the 2027 legislative session - which would do for caregivers what A-Corps does for artists. Add family caregiver status as a protected class. Require a documented interactive process before flexible work is denied. Name creative dismissal in Colorado statute for the first time.

Both bills are answering the same question: what do we owe to the workers the economy depends on but refuses to recognize?

The accidental accommodation.

When I was hired in 2020, remote work wasn't an accommodation - it was the policy. That mandatory flexibility had an unintended consequence: it kept me close to my mother, who has end-stage dementia. Presence matters in end-stage dementia - not dramatic presence, just the daily availability that lets a person feel located in a world that is increasingly not locating them.

In 2022 and 2023, I had formal accommodations. Then 2024 - a sweeping return-to-office policy, applied broadly, with no conversation about what that policy meant for my caregiving situation. No interactive process. No documentation of what the accommodation had been doing.

A policy changed. A care arrangement changed with it. The law had nothing to say.

That is the bill.

Foundational labor.

I have been trying to name this category of work - the labor that everything else is built on, the load-bearing wall inside the structure that no one sees until someone tries to remove it. My family name, Fukae - 深江 - means deep bay in Japanese. The depth invisible from the surface but determining everything about what the bay can hold.

The labor that accumulates invisibly and sustains everything visible downstream.

Sen. Catlin said it about artists. He was also saying it about caregivers. If people are going to build something, they need a system that matches how they actually operate.

Read and Listen to the full piece: therevenueneutralcaregiver.substack.com

Share the CARE Act petition: https://chng.it/DLWncS9wtT 757 signatures. 677 supporters. 243 from 1,000.

Contact: mark_fukae@casiadvocacy.org | (303) 817-6995