Access to social protection for platform and other non-standard workers: A literature review
Tamara A. Kool, Giulio Bordon & Franziska Gassmann
#2021-002
The need to extend social protection to include new forms of employment
has progressively been recognised by policymakers in the last decade.
Several countries introduced new schemes particularly for this group or
made provisions to existing schemes to cover new forms of employment. In
order to get a better overview of the different measures applied, this
paper systematically reviews the existing literature with a focus on
European countries and a subset of OECD countries, by focusing first on
how non-standard, and in particular platform workers are classified and
legally protected. Secondly, the paper reviews the extent to which
platform and other non-standard workers have access to the different
forms of social security provisions.
While there is a clear conceptualisation of how platform work can be
classified, the challenge lies in the legal construct underlying the
work activities. Differing practices prevail between countries and only
a few have thus far explicitly recognised platform work or crowd work as
a form of employment. The lack of statutory and effective social
protection coverage of platform workers can be addressed in various
ways. These include adjusting existing schemes in terms of eligibility
criteria, portability of transfers, incorporating digital innovation,
and providing flexible security. Current shifts in policies have the
potential to decrease socio-economic differences between different
employment statuses. Ultimately, these shifts promote the
transferability of individuals' social rights between employment
statuses and ease the use of individual social protection accounts.
Keywords: platform work, social security
JEL Classification: H55, J20, O33