Guillaume Villon, Senior Manager of the Department of the International Social Security Association: As a result of informal employment, a significant part of the population does not have access to pensions

The second panel session of the High-level International Round Table "Prospects for the development of mandatory accumulative and mixed pension systems" was held under the general theme "Coverage and awareness of the population". The moderator was a well-known financier, statesman Bolat Zhamishev.

Guillaume Fillon, Senior Manager of the Social Security Development Department of the International Social Security Association (ISSA, Geneva, Switzerland), introduced the report "Strategies to expand coverage of social security and pension systems: global challenges and solutions" to those present

According to the speaker, one of the main goals of the ISSA in recent years is to reach certain segments of the population - the self-employed, small business owners, rural workers, migrants and women.

The ISSA guidelines for solving these categories of problems are:

administrative regulation to expand coverage;
error and fraud avoidance policy;
collection of contributions;
compliance and communication with stakeholders.

In order to implement these tasks, the ISSA, together with its partners, develops agreed recommendations. The speaker noted that they are not mandatory for widespread implementation, but are desirable for each organization, taking into account the nature of their activities. At the same time, Mr. Guillaume Fillon stressed that the ways to achieve the set goals imply coordinated actions between all ISSA members and partners.

Potential ways to implement the planned are being developed with the help of best practices. One of them is the use of state subsidies as a lever for the formalization of labor, and one of the illustrations may be China's experience in expanding health coverage. Another way is to simplify conditions for small businesses, following the example of 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 is done in Latin America or Madagascar.

The speaker noted that the transition to new forms of work and the economy of free earnings is now increasingly underway. However, this is an ambiguous step and in some ways a return to the 19th century, when during the Industrial Revolution, in fact, a dependent employee was considered the owner of his work and the employer had nothing to do with his protection. Due to the informal nature 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 while in many developed countries a significant part of the population is covered by some form of mandatory funded pension system, in developing countries a significant part of the population works in the informal sector and does not have access to pension schemes. But the problems of social insecurity 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 covert dependent work.

According to the speaker, an important role in solving the problem of coverage of the population by social and pension programs is played by public awareness and increasing financial literacy of the population.