New jobs, old rules. How non-standard workers can fit in standard Social Security Schemes?

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate concerning the challenges that platform economy poses to social security systems. Ideas for trying to offer social protection to not-standard workers will be discussed to mitigate these challenges. Since the advent of globalisation, the modern labour market is demanding more flexible jobs’ relationships with the result that in some countries workers are no longer divided between employees and self-employed. Moreover, the rapid technological progress driven by the digital revolution is profoundly affecting the way in which jobs are demanded and supplied. Lastly, demographic changes are putting in danger the degree of financial stability of the whole social security system. Concerning jobs on digital platform, on one hand, digitalisation has been able to both reduce employment barriers for workers who were excluded from the labour market through the easy access to new jobs opportunities, and rescue economic transactions from the illegal market by recording employment activities; on the other hand, due to the short-duration of these contracts, digital workers may struggle to have access to social protection due to the lower chances that they have to reach the contributions threshold required by the legislation. Social security systems have been designed having in mind a single, stable, full-time worker as a model. In other words, the legislator has set up a protection system using schemes based on the employment status for determining contribution rates, regulations, benefits and the labour law applicable to the workers. In particular, when looking at social insurance regulations, the separation among categories of workers is essential to define both their future pension amount and the responsibilities related to charging and transferring social contributions. The image of this conflict between the social security systems and the digital workers environment can be easily represented by a puzzle that does not fit because of the lack of flexibility of the first one and the “excess” of flexibility of the second one. Building on this mismatch, the paper describes the (d)evolution of the employment relationships in the modern labour market due to the flexibility needed by firms and continues with a focus on the recent Italian jurisprudence concerning platform workers. Policy options to increase the income security of on-demand workers offered by the recent OECD study published in November 2018 will be commented. Conclusively, the paper proposes ideas to obtain adequate social security and pension entitlements for non-standard workers in a standard social security panorama