Globalisation, technological progress and demographic change profoundly affect OECD labour markets, influencing both the quantity and quality of jobs that are available, as well as how and by whom they are carried out. Policy makers need to strengthen the resilience and adaptability of labour markets so that workers can manage the transition with the least possible disruption, while reaping as much as possible its benefits. Against this backdrop, the OECD Future of Work initiative looks at how demographic change, globalisation and technological progress are affecting job quantity and quality, as well as labour market inclusiveness - and what this means for labour market, skills and social policy.

Most social protection systems were designed with the archetypical full-time dependent employee in mind. Work patterns deviating from this model – be it self-employment or online ‘gig work’ – can lead to coverage gaps. This is not a marginal issue. Across the OECD on average, 16% of all workers are self-employed, and a further 13% of all dependent employees are on temporary employment contracts. Temporary workers often struggle to accumulate minimum contribution periods, and the self-employed are often covered only by the most basic of benefits.

This chapter sets out by presenting the main challenges of covering non-standard workers in contributory social protection systems. It then discusses the advantages and pitfalls of two basic ways in which social protection systems could adapt to these challenges: by tying entitlements to individual workers rather than employment relationships or by doing the opposite and untying benefits from contributions. The chapter offers theoretical considerations and practical country experiences in offering voluntary social protection to non-standard workers, and looks at how social security contributions themselves can be a driver of non-standard work. It then presents two examples of special schemes for non-standard workers, and discusses the emerging challenge of improving the social protection and job quality of platform workers. Finally, it draws policy lessons on improving the social protection of non-standard workers and enhancing the income security of the increasing number of on-demand and flexible hours workers.

Changes in the nature of work and labour market regulation pose challenges to social protection systems relying on social insurance contributions. In contrast, the Australian system of social protection relies on general government revenue rather than social security contributions. In this system, some of the vulnerabilities of the social insurance state may not be so salient, but other challenges and trade-offs exist. In particular, Australia has been described as a “wage-earner’s welfare state” (Castles, 1985), with social protection linked to employment conditions, including relatively high minimum wages, paid sick, care, parental and holiday leave, workers compensation and mandatory occupational pensions. As in social insurance states, changes in the nature of work could potentially undermine these features of the Australian social protection system. A further difference is that the Australian social security system is highly income-tested, with spending being more targeted to the poor than any other OECD country. Administration of income-testing becomes more complicated if patterns of work become irregular or other circumstances, such as multiple job holding become common. This chapter assesses Australian employment and social security policies and institutions to identify strengths and weaknesses of the Australian approach to social security.

The social protection of people in non-standard forms of employment has been a political issue in Austria since the mid-1990s. Non-standard workers have been integrated into the general social insurance system through a series of reforms, with the declared goal of preventing evasion from compulsory insurance and integrating all types of earned income from employment into social security. These reforms are likely to have contributed to a substantial reduction in the number of independent contractors. However, the number of self-employed tradespeople and of so-called “new self-employed” continued to rise and there are some indications that this to some degree compensated for the reduction in the number of independent contractors. Tradespeople and the new self-employed in most cases benefit from lower statutory insurance contributions than for those in standard dependent employment, which may imply a financial incentive to opt for these forms of employment. Furthermore, the lack of unemployment insurance coverage, in the case of self-employed people, and comparatively low employment stability and often low incomes, in the case of self-employed people and independent contractors, increase the likelihood that people in these types of employment later become (partly) dependent on tax-financed basic financial security.

This chapter discusses the ongoing efforts to integrate the social protection of self-employed workers into the general social protection system in France. Several autonomous schemes and a complex system of contribution rates and entitlements obscure the relationship between gross and net wages and hinder the mobility of workers across jobs and occupations. While there have been efforts to harmonise the social protection of self-employed workers and employees, differences in coverage and contribution rates remain. The social protection of employees and self-employed workers is also managed by diverse institutions which are imperfectly coordinated. This paper describes the contribution rates and the social protection of various forms of employment in France. It provides information about the different components of the social protection of self-employed people (the organisation of schemes and their financial architecture, membership of the schemes, contributions and benefits) and compares the situation of different kinds of self-employed workers with that of employees. The chapter also discusses a special unemployment scheme for performing artists and related occupations, the Intermittents du spectacle.

This chapter discusses the German Artists‘ Social Security Fund, a special social security scheme for self-employed artists and writers within the German Statutory Insurance Scheme. It starts with a brief overview of the general German Social Security System. It then goes on to discuss why the Artists’ Social Insurance Fund was established and how it works, including descriptive statistics on its members, their earnings and the scheme’s coverage rates. Among other relevant aspects, it highlights how financial contributions are shared between the artists, users and state subsidies. The chapter concludes with a short discussion of the efficiency and the effectiveness of the Artists‘ Social Security Fund compared to the standard pension scheme.

This chapter focuses on para-subordinate workers in Italy, i.e. individuals who are legally self-employed but who are often “economically dependent” on a single employer. The chapter first presents the welfare provisions that para-subordinate workers are entitled to receive, pointing out that the disadvantages facing para-subordinate workers relative to employees have been recently reduced. Afterwards, making use of the most suitable available longitudinal data, statistics about the evolution over time of the number and characteristics of para-subordinate workers are shown and the first phase of the working career of para-subordinate workers is observed, assessing vulnerability in terms of earnings level, employability and accrual of pension contributions over a ten-year period.

Over the last decades, the share of non-standard work in The Netherlands has grown substantially and it is now among the highest of all OECD-countries. Approximately one in three workers work in a non-standard work arrangement (including own-account or temporary work, variable hours contracts and agency work). In the current Dutch institutional setting, firms can save social contributions, severance payments, re-integration obligations and tedious administrative procedures by hiring people as own account workers or, to a lesser extent, through one of the other non-standard work arrangements. By using temporary work arrangements, for example, employers can circumvent employment protection legislation – i.e. severance payments and time-consuming procedures to ask for permission to dismiss – and sickness related payments and re-integration obligations that end upon the end date of the contract. If policy makers wish to reduce the share of non-standard work arrangements, they should aim to reduce incentives to hire workers on non-standard contracts, by reducing differences in taxes and social security coverage between non-standard and standard work.

There is an ongoing debate in OECD countries on how to provide social insurance coverage for non-standard workers. A possible solution is government subsidised voluntary social insurance. Such programs are common in Sweden. However, voluntary social insurance programs for non-standard workers – notably unemployment insurance – face several challenges that need to be addressed for such programs to function satisfactorily. The most salient is how the risk of voluntary quits is managed. This chapter reviews how Swedish social insurance programs square with non-standard work arrangements. It finds that the bar to access voluntary unemployment insurance is higher for non-standard workers, mainly since it is hard to establish that a job loss is involuntary. Non-standard workers are also not covered in collective bargained social insurance schemes, most notably occupational pensions, which account for 25% of total pensions. A further conclusion is that for voluntary programs to work, the rate of subsidies provided by the government must be sufficiently high. Data from Sweden show that otherwise premiums will be high causing insurance coverage to fall.