Fluid work can empower or exploit workers, and COVID and other disruptions have accelerated and starkly illuminated the difference. Will fluid work evolve on a solid platform that offers empowerment rather than exploitation? A solid platform for fluid work can preserve the options that the crises have created for organizations, society and workers. Or, those options may be lost in a race to protect workers by reclassifying them into traditional jobs. Important choices are being made now, often with little or very poor data and evidence. Those choices are happening within the frameworks of social, regulatory and policy actions, accelerated by today’s disruptions.