First published in 1948, the International Social Security Review is the principal international quarterly publication in the field of social security.
The article discusses the current practices for providing social protection to refugees and migrants, focusing primarily on low- and middle-income (LMICs) destination countries. It examines formal providers of social protection, including state institutions, development agencies and humanitarian organizations. In recent years, there has been an increase in funding from multilateral donors, especially in the context of the COVID–19 pandemic, leading to the establishment of national assistance programmes in LMICs that also encompass refugees and to a lesser extent migrant workers. International agencies play a crucial role in providing humanitarian cash assistance to refugees, given their status under international protection under the 1951 refugee Convention and related protocols. Access to social insurance remains tied to formal employment. Social insurance entitlements for migrants are often restricted and refugees are typically excluded from formal employment in LMICs. Regarding labour market interventions, refugees and migrants are often excluded from national programmes, with migrants’ residence permits being often tied to employment. For refugees, international agencies take a prominent role in providing livelihood programmes aimed at enhancing income-generating opportunities, economic inclusion and financial independence. However, the effectiveness of these interventions remains unclear, lacking rigorous evidence, and often being short-term with limited coverage.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) outlines the rights for every child, including the right to benefit from social security and the right to a standard of living adequate for their physical, mental, spiritual, moral, and social development. The UNCRC is the most widely ratified human rights treaty to date. However, millions of children continue to be denied their rights and face poverty, vulnerability and social exclusion, merely because they are displaced – internally or across borders. Children bear the heaviest burden of displacement, despite not being responsible for its triggers. This reality underlines that a significant population is being “left behind”, threatening progress to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals as part of international efforts to end poverty and ensure all people enjoy peace and prosperity. This article advocates for inclusive social protection systems for displaced children by highlighting the difficulties they encounter, emphasizing the potential benefits of social protection, and assessing the current status of inclusive social protection for this vulnerable group. Drawing on emerging lessons from UNICEF’s experience across several refugee and internal displacement contexts, such as Brazil, Ethiopia, Slovakia, and Türkiye, the article also offers recommendations to strengthen inclusive social protection systems specifically tailored to meet the humanitarian and development needs of displaced children.
The target populations to be covered in this article on the extension of social protection coverage are refugees, as defined by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Our approach to their coverage is based on the pillars of public health and social protection, which together provide the rationale and legislative basis for coverage. The social protection benefits to be covered are comprehensive health services, providing entitlement to services without conditions such as prior contributions or duration of residence. Refugees are vulnerable since they come from conflict areas or go through persecution and personal threat. They carry grief from the loss of family members and friends, property and livelihood, and social and cultural support. Some have sustained injuries before rescue and evacuation and need additional care. They may have chronic diseases and need medications they can no longer access. Some may have communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis, and children may have missed scheduled mandatory vaccinations. Refugees are vulnerable to new and re-emerging infections, as seen in the COVID–19 pandemic. While the focus in this article is on providing health care, the social determinants of health are addressed, including access to education, employment with decent working conditions, and safe environments. We focus on coverage by national authorities and institutions, legislative amendments to enable entitlement to non-citizens, and provide national examples. Experience has shown that coverage is feasible with the assistance and guidance of international and local organizations and associations and with an acceptance by the existing social protection institutions of the benefits of extending coverage to new members. This article concurs with the principle and pledge of the 2030 Social Development Goals of the United Nations to “leave no one behind”.
UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has the mandate to save lives and build better futures for millions of forcibly displaced and stateless people. This contribution sets out UNHCR’s mandated roles concerning displaced population groups and details the nature of the humanitarian and human development challenges that confront the international community. In this important regard, the social protection coverage extension objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Global Partnership for Universal Social Protection (USP), to leave no one behind, are considered essential.
For the public employment services of many Member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the importance of using profiling tools for job seekers is increasing rapidly in importance. With this trend, there is also widening concern about the risks of an over reliance on such tools. Part of the concern lies with a lack of transparency concerning how such tools work. This article aims to address this by offering a detailed investigation of the Work Profiler – the instrument used in the Netherlands by the Institute for Employee Benefits (Uitvoeringsinstituut Werknemersverzekeringen – UWV) to predict re-employment success and provide a diagnosis of key factors hindering job seekers’ return to work. Professionals use these insights to deepen their understanding of the situation of job seekers and decide together with job seeker how to support their return to work. UWV decided to maintain and revise the Work Profiler through a large-scale study involving a sample of 53,238 people. Work Profiler 1.0 was developed in 2007–2010 and has been in use on a regional basis since 2011 and nationwide since 2015. This article explains how the new tool (version 2.0; implemented in 2018) works and, most importantly, demonstrates the choices made to ensure that it functions well and is used effectively by professionals. These latter two aspects are rarely discussed in the literature.
Most jurisdictions grant differentiated and more beneficial treatment – usually in the form of early retirement, and commonly under special pension schemes – to workers in arduous or hazardous jobs. Several justifications for such treatment have been advanced, including i) compensating the worker for the hardship, ii) protecting the worker from the hazard, and iii) realizing the principle of equality in the distribution of costs and benefits in the social security system. This article analyses these functions from a socioeconomic perspective and explains how early retirement for workers in arduous and hazardous jobs is necessary to ensure equality by treating “unequals unequally”, and in proportion to their inequality. Moreover, this article presents a precise formula to calculate when a worker should be allowed to retire, so that workers in occupational domains with a shorter life expectancy do not systematically enjoy lower expected benefits from the pension system while having contributed the same amount. Implications for the design and desirability of special pension benefits are discussed.
This article highlights the debate on social security regimes applicable to platform workers in Italy. As social security regimes differ according to the type of employment or self-employment relationship, Italian case law dealing with platform workers’ employment status will be illustrated. Italian legislation, case law and collective bargaining on health and safety at work will then be presented, clarifying the coverage to which platform workers are entitled in the event of accidents at work and occupational diseases, with a focus on the COVID-19 pandemic impact. In turn, the two main Italian minimum income schemes and the related scholarly debate will be outlined, as well as their impact on the ability of digital labour platforms to avoid their responsibilities as regards workers’ rights, including access to adequate social protection.
The online platform economy raises a range of intricate legal questions connected to labour law and social security protection. In particular, the atypical forms of labour relationships used by many online platforms (e.g. multilateral, hyper-temporary, off-site, autonomous), often contractually defined as independent contracting, have challenged the application of labour and occupational health and safety law in many countries across the world, as the application of these norms tends to be dependent on the existence of an “employment relationship”. These developments are compounding the general increase in atypical employment, especially as a result of the 2007–08 financial and economic crisis. It has mostly fallen to courts to resolve the disputes between online platforms and their online platform workers, but some European Union (EU) Member States (such as France) have taken specific legal measures in response to these difficulties. Also, the EU-level as such is becoming increasingly involved, with the Court of Justice’s ruling in the case of Uber providing some guidance on the “employment question”, and a pending legislative initiative on a Directive for Transparent and Predictable Working Conditions which may provide minimum labour protection for online platform workers in the EU. This article analyses the problem of labour law in the online platform economy and surveys the various responses by courts and policy-makers across the EU, which may furthermore set the tone for developments outside the EU in this area.
In 2008, Great Britain overhauled its disability benefit programme by introducing a new disability determination process called the Work Capability Assessment and a new earnings replacement programme called Employment and Support Allowance. This article examines the British reforms from the perspective of the United States, which may consider changes to its disability benefit programme, the Social Security Disability Insurance programme, in the near future. The article provides an overview of the steps leading to the reform in Great Britain, details how the new programme operates, reviews research on its initial implementation and effects, and identifies lessons for the potential reform of the disability benefit programme in the United States.
Nigeria has a predominantly youthful population and limited job opportunities in the formal labour market, which makes the search for formal employment difficult and can be conducive to the growth of exploitative working conditions. As one response to address the vulnerability of Nigerian workers, the Employee's Compensation Act was passed into law in December 2010. Of note, the Act includes provisions for compensation for mental health injuries, or “mental stress”, suffered in the course of employment. The article examines the strengths and weaknesses of the provisions, in particular the premise for mental health injury claims made in the Act. The wider policy implications of the Act as regards the development of compensation for mental health injuries in sub‐Saharan Africa are discussed and suggestions for the future review of the Act offered.
The informal workforce is growing worldwide, and changes in the global structure of employment and in places of employment mean that work is a source of hazard and ill‐health for many poorer workers. Yet informal workers do not have access to work‐related social security. They face high work‐related risks, but have little or no access to reliable formal or informal social protection. Citizen‐focused social security programmes, such as cash transfers, do not give enough attention to the needs of able‐bodied adults who work. Further, informal workplaces are not covered by the traditional discipline and practice of occupational health and safety (OHS), which is a necessary component of overall work‐related social security. In particular, poorer informal workers are ill‐placed to make use of possible preventive interventions, as they may lead to loss of income in the short term. A more inclusive approach will require changes in the institutional arrangements governing OHS, and should involve especially local authorities and informal worker organizations, who are developing influential international sectoral networks. In this regard, promising examples of negotiated and inclusive OHS policy reforms are presented. The broader challenge is to develop an expanded OHS that specifically includes informal workers as “workers”, rather than as “vulnerable citizens” who qualify only for poverty‐oriented social protection programmes, and that explicitly addresses preventive measures.
Using an inventory of local and/or non‐statutory transfers (droits connexes) in 13 French towns and cities, the article first measures the gains from returning to work for recipients of national, statutory means‐tested benefits (Revenu minimum d'insertion— RMI, and Allocation parent isolé— API) by type of household before 2009. The reforms of national, statutory benefits carried out during the 2000s, especially those affecting the working tax credit (Prime pour l'emploi— PPE), failed to ensure that the recipients of means‐tested benefits always stood to gain financially from returning to work. The effects of the reforms were offset by the effects of other measures. The article then simulates the effects of the introduction of the Revenu de solidarité active (RSA) in place of the RMI in 2009, and takes into account the way that local and/or non‐statutory transfers are modified by increases in national, statutory transfers. We observe that the RSA eliminates the financial disincentives to returning to work for almost all localities and types of household. The article shows that the marginal tax rate of 38 per cent chosen by the government is very close to the upper limit compatible with a back‐to‐work incentive.
This article examines the timing of the introduction of four major social security programmes — work accident insurance, sickness benefits, pensions, and family allowances — in 43 African countries. Further, it explores whether legislative structure, dominant religion or the colonial past of the country is of importance when we control for year of independence, prosperity, degree of democracy, government stability, industrialization and the size and ethnic homogeneity of the population. On the basis of Cox hazard rate modelling it is concluded that industrialized, homogeneous and rather populous countries that were under French rule tend to be pioneers in African social security legislation.