The Social Impact Report analysed “social protection coverage for 8 types of benefits across diverse forms of work in about 40 countries” and showed “how the crisis can be used as an opportunity to speed up the innovation of safety nets, taking inspiration from the private employment services sector in providing protection schemes for a dynamic workforce”.

The report illustrated that different forms of work have different coverage in terms of social protection, ranging from full-time open-ended employees to self-employed workers:

• “Workers on an employment contract - temporary, open-ended, or agency workers - receive largely similar statutory access to social protection branches. […]
• The self-employed have access to statutory safety nets much less frequently than employees. In just one-fifth of countries do self-employed have full statutory access to unemployment benefits. Often, self-employed are only able to access different social protection schemes on a partial or voluntary basis”.

Such variety of forms of work was the result of important changes in the labour market. However, “social protection systems have been slow in adapting to these changes”.

The report emphasised how “the variety of work arrangements to choose from in today’s labour markets is larger than ever before, providing choice and flexibility to both employers and workers. While flexibility is certainly crucial for well-functioning labour markets, security and protection are equally essential”.

Moreover, social protection and safety nets are not the only essential elements in today’s labour markets; other features are key, such as efficient labour markets, upskilling, reduction of informality, easy transitions, etc.

Private employment services play a key role in this sense, since they provide an entry point for unemployed and demonstrated even more their contribution to the labour market during Covid-19 crisis. The sector contribution to participation, transitions and inclusiveness was already the subject of the WEC Social Impact Report 2019.  

“It’s time to speed up Social Innovation and create new safety nets”, said WEC Managing Director, Denis Pennel, while underlining the policy recommendations of the report, namely:

• Basic minimum levels of social protection need to be available and accessible to all workers irrespective of their work arrangement. (“Portable social protection rights tied to the person rather than to the job type are crucial in this respect to allow movement across jobs, work arrangements and sectors while keeping risk at a minimum”).
• The Covid-19 crisis provides an opportunity to speed up the innovation of safety nets to accommodate all and by sharing costs, benefits and risks proportionally.
• Through social dialogue, the private employment services industry has developed initiatives to provide protections for a dynamic workforce, offering inspiration on how safety nets can be reformed to cover workers moving between jobs and across sectors.