ANNOUNCEMENT
Dr Guillaume Filhon, Senior Project Manager, Social Security Development Branch, ISSA: As a result of informal employment, a significant part of the population does not have access to pensions
Under the general title “Coverage and Public awareness” the second panel session of the International High-Level Round Table “Mandatory Funded and Mixed Pension Schemes Development Prospects” was held. The moderator was the famous financier and statesman Mr Bolat Zhamishev.
The report “Strategies for improving social pension systems coverage: Global challenges and solutions” was presented by Dr Guillaume Filhon, Senior Project Manager of Social Security Development Branch of the International Social Security Association (ISSA, Geneva, Switzerland).
According to the speech, one of the main ISSA goal in recent years has been to cover the difficult to cover groups: self-employed and microbusiness, domestic workers, rural workers, migrants, and women.
The ISSA Guidelines covering this issue of difficult to cover groups are the following:
To achieve these objectives, ISSA, together with partners, is developing agreed Guidelines. The speaker noted that they are not compulsory for widespread implementation, but are desirable for each organization, taking into account the nature of their activities. At the same time, Dr Fillon emphasized that ways to achieve these goals imply coordinated actions between all ISSA members and partners.
Potential “Hows” to achieve this are given through the good practices. One is the use of a public subsidy as a lever for formalization of the activity and one illustration of this could be the way China expanded the coverage of its healthcare. Another recommendation is simplification, as it’s been done for small business in France.
As a positive example of expanding communications to involve the informally employed population in the social security system, the speaker cited partnerships with national education, as they’ve been put in place in Latin America or in Madagascar.
The speaker noted that now there is an increasing transition to new forms of work and a gig economy. However, this is a controversial step and in some ways an attempt to come back to the 19th century, when during the Industrial Revolution a virtually dependent worker was considered the owner of his labor and the employer had nothing to do with his protection. Due to the informality of labor relations, situations arise when the employer is not responsible to his employees, for example, in case of accidents, as well as to protect the lives of workers and their families from unemployment, illness, old age, etc. And if in many developed countries a significant part of the population is covered by one or another form of compulsory funded pension system, then in developing countries a significant part of the population works in the informal sector and does not have access to pension schemes. But problems of social vulnerability of workers arise everywhere. An example of this is the lawsuit against Uber, which was convicted in a number of countries (Great Britain, France, Spain, etc.) for hidden dependent work.
An important role in solving the problem of coverage of the population with social and pension programs, according to the speaker, plays public awareness and increase of financial literacy of the population.