Social Protection Floor Research Articles

Social protection guarantees as legal rights? The International Labour Organization, the United States, and the American ‘national context’

This article examines the development of the global Social Protection Floor proposal inside the International Labour Organization (ILO) from 2009 (when the ILO was designated as a lead agency in the process) through to the adoption of Recommendation 202 in 2012. While there was a considerably more high-profile external process under the auspices of the Advisory Group chaired by former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, the article argues that it was in the internal ILO process that debates regarding the most important substantive elements of the Recommendation were resolved. The United States was vigorously involved in this process and had a crucial influence on the substantive development of Recommendation 202. First, US involvement played a key role in limiting the degree to which – and manner in which – the recommendation would apply to medium- and high-income countries with established social protection systems. Second, the United States contributed to successfully blocking the definition of social protection as comprising sets of legally enforceable entitlements enshrined in national legislation. This marked a significant shift in the substantive meaning of the recognition of a human right to social protection. US efforts in this regard can be understood as the result of its concern regarding the uneasy fit between a potential recommendation and its own domestic social protection provision.

The Social Protection Floor and the ‘New’ social investment policies in Japan and South Korea

Japan and South Korea have always taken what may be called a social investment approach to their social and economic development policies. They were able to achieve a high level of economic growth, in part, because of their targeted social spending that supported and protected the productive sectors of the society. Since the 1990s, however, there has been a marked shift in the targets of social investment, from predominantly skilled, male, industrial core workers to more peripheral, marginalized, and vulnerable population groups, such as women, children, and the elderly. Moreover, this new policy focus is now increasingly put forward from the perspective of inclusive welfare and the discourse of social inclusion, thus breaking from the earlier productivist thinking. Indeed, recent social investment policy debates in the two countries are often framed in terms of intergenerational equity, social and economic sustainability, and economic democracy. What are these ‘new social investments’, and why the shifts? This article looks at the new social investment policies in Japan and South Korea to understand factors behind the changes, and assess how ‘new’ are these new social investments.

News and Views...from ICSW: The Global Coalition for the Social Protection Floors: A new level of international cooperation

News and Views...from ICSW: The Global Coalition for the Social Protection Floors: A new level of international cooperation

Institutional change for strong sustainable consumption: sustainable consumption and the degrowth economy

The environmental space concept illustrates that socially unsustainable underconsumption must be overcome and environmentally unsustainable overconsumption must be phased out. The planetary boundaries help to quantify the “ceiling,” while the social protection floor concept operationalizes the linea de dignidad, the minimal conditions for a dignified life. In order for Western societies to respect these limits, significant institutional change is needed with respect to both orientations and mechanisms. For the ceiling, this article suggests a shift to an orientation of “better but less” for affluent groups, and toward “enough and better” for those still living in poverty. The corresponding mechanisms include a redistribution of income and wealth, a cap on income, an unconditional minimum income, and a strengthening of democracy. The choice of instruments has to take into account that consumption is to a large degree not an individual but a social act and to employ informational, financial, and legal measures that overcome the preference of decision makers for market instruments. Implementing these changes would alter the fabric of our societies. Important first steps can be taken here and now.

Globalization and the rise of precarious employment: the new frontier for workplace health promotion

Global market integration over the past three decades has led to labour market restructuring in most countries around the world. Employment flexibility has been emphasized as a way for employers to restructure their organizations to remain globally competitive. This flexibility has resulted in the growth of precarious employment, which has been exacerbated by the global financial crisis and resulting recession in 2007/2008, and the ongoing economic uncertainty throughout much of the world. Precarious employment may result in short and long-term health consequences for many workers. This presents a deeper and more structural determinant of health than what health promoters have traditionally considered. It calls for a different understanding of workplace health promotion research and intervention that goes beyond enabling healthier lifestyle choices or advocating safer workplace conditions to ensuring adequate social protection floors that provide people with sufficient resources to lead healthy lives, and for advocacy for taxation justice to finance such protection.

Social protection assessment‐based national dialogue exercises: Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, Viet Nam

AbstractBetween 2011 and 2013, the International Labour Organization, in collaboration with governments and several United Nations agencies working as part of the Social Protection Floor Initiative, conducted social protection assessment‐based national dialogue (ABND) exercises in Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Viet Nam. The exercises were carried out in order to take stock of existing social protection realities in the respective countries, including social insurance, social assistance and anti‐poverty programmes. These inventories present a comprehensive picture of what elements of national social protection floors (SPFs) are in place, where “holes” in national floors exist, and provide a framework within which to propose recommendations for the further design and implementation of social protection provisions that guarantee at least the SPF to the entire population. This article describes the methodology for conducting ABND exercises, the situational analysis of the SPF in four countries, and the policy recommendations that were formulated for achieving basic health care and income security for children, the working‐age population and the elderly. The results of preliminary calculations of the cost of implementing proposed policy options are also outlined.

China’s welfare reform: An ambiguous road towards a Social Protection Floor

China’s recent efforts in extending social protection resonate with the goals of the Social Protection Floor, even if Chinese policy-makers have not explicitly incorporated the Floor in the reform process. However, as this review of developments in the fields of social assistance, unemployment insurance, pensions, and health insurance suggests, major challenges persist, namely inadequate and declining benefit levels, funding issues, and fragmentation of the system, which to some degree have perpetuated existing inequalities. These challenges reflect a strong institutional heritage from the pre-reform era, which poses the biggest obstacle to the development of a coherent national social protection system.

Back to the future? The Social Protection Floor of Bretton Woods

This article locates the genesis of the recent initiative to create minimal levels of social protection worldwide much earlier than conventional wisdom. Rather than seeing this initiative as a relatively new one, the author argues that it is resurrecting and building upon core ideas from the foundation of the postwar international economic order in the early 1940s. This argument rests on a major reinterpretation of the origins of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreements. Drawing on extensive archival work, the author shows that the Bretton Woods negotiations were informed by new commitments to provide ‘social security’ and ‘freedom from want’ worldwide in ways that echo the aspirations of contemporary proponents of the Social Protection Floor Initiative. These goals found widespread support not just among leading US and British policymakers at the time but also among many officials from other countries involved in the Bretton Woods negotiations, including those from poor countries. Although this aspect of the Bretton Woods vision was de-emphasized after the war, this neglected history helps to identify some deep intellectual and political roots of contemporary debates.

Health workforce benchmarks for universal health coverage and sustainable development

Universal health coverage (UHC) includes the guarantee that everyone will be protected over the entire life-cycle by a defined set of essential health services fulfilling four interrelated criteria, as set out in Social Protection Floors Recommendation, 2012 (202) of the International Labour Organization (ILO): availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality. 1 Insofar as it furthers health, which is essential to human productivity and economic progress, UHC – and the health workforce needed to attain it – serves as a foundation to sustainable development. Gaps in the health workforce – in number, distribution and skills – undermine service availability, acceptability, accessibility and quality. Such gaps can also create financial barriers and impoverish people when they have to seek care without being covered by a social health protection system or scheme. Access to quality services is vitally dependent on the existence of a health workforce that is able to meet needs and enjoys decent working conditions, characterized by training opportunities, attractive employment, good career prospects, fair remuneration, adequate social protection, a safe work environment and access to dispute settlement mechanisms, as described in the ILO Nursing Personnel Convention No. 149. 2 Service accessibility is further compromised by factors external to the health sector that influence the financing of health and of the health workforce. Of particular relevance are the socioeconomic contexts in which people live and work. Poverty, unemployment and low wages affect a household’s ability to pay for needed health care, be it through taxes, employee contributions, premiums or out-of-pocket expenditure. At the national level, high poverty rates and the existence of large informal economies often result in tax revenues that are insufficient for adequate funding of health care and that challenge governments’ technical capacity to supply services in areas where unregistered workers and their families live. In highly vulnerable countries, defined by the ILO 3 as those where most people work in the informal economy and most of the population is poor, health care is accessible to much fewer people than in countries with low poverty rates and small informal economies. 4 Furthermore, in such countries most health care is financed by out-of-pocket payments that can reach catastrophic levels and plunge families into dire poverty or bar their access to needed care. According to the ILO, over 1.5 billion people in the world are living and working in socioeconomic contexts that challenge adequate financing of UHC and the attainment of sustainable development, so critically dependent on the presence of a healthy population. Any health workforce benchmark for measuring sustainable progress towards UHC must reflect the above-mentioned aspects, including the basic socioeconomic causes of UHC gaps beyond the health sector. 5 One such benchmark is the

Background Document for the Workshop - ‘Interpreting and Advancing Women's Rights to Social Security and Social Protection’

This Background Paper was written for the 2013 Onati Workshop ‘Interpreting and Advancing Women’s Rights to Social Security and Social Protection’ by Beth Goldblatt and Lucie Lamarche. Both the ILO and UN human rights treaty bodies revisited the human right to social security in the last decade. Namely, the UN Experts Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights adopted in 2007 General Comment no 19 on the right to social security. ILO adopted in 2012 Recommendation no 202 concerning national floors of social protection. But do such important initiatives engender the right to social security? Important national initiatives address the issue of women's poverty and extreme poverty. Do such initiatives respect all the components of the gender equality standard? And, reciprocally, all dimensions of the human right to social security? Do women have a human right to be more than not so poor? What does the interdependent interpretation of the right to social security mean for all women in all situations: working women, women of the informal sector, women embedded in productive (domestic or other) activities? The authors suggest that the right to social security can be transformative for women if properly interpreted.

Civil society and the social protection floor

AbstractCivil society wholeheartedly supports the concept of social protection floors and, in particular, the adoption of the ILO Recommendation concerning national floors of social protection, 2012 (No. 202). The implementation of social protection floors will be a great step forward towards the reduction of poverty and inequality as well as to the empowerment of people worldwide. The civil society movement is convinced that the rights‐based approach is the most effective way to design and implement empowering and sustainable social protection floors. With regard to the human rights‐based implementation of the social protection guarantees, it has four specific attention points: i) respect for the rights and dignity of people holding rights to social security; ii) full participation of civil society; iii) universal coverage at the local, national and international level; iv) and concern for vulnerable groups. Following the 101st International Labour Conference in 2012, 59 civil society organizations set up the “Coalition for a Social Protection Floor”, whose two main tasks are: to monitor and contribute to the universal implementation of social protection floors at local and national levels; and to promote the social protection floor concept in global policy‐making, such as in the discussions on the post‐2015 development agenda.

Financing social protection floors: Considerations of fiscal space

AbstractThe effectiveness of social protection in combating poverty and vulnerability, cushioning shocks, attenuating inequality, and supporting long‐term growth is well‐established, but effective social protection systems have long been seen as an unaffordable luxury in many developing and low‐income countries. The social protection floor concept aims at providing a guaranteed minimum of social protection at a reasonable cost, even in resource‐constrained circumstances, serving as a platform for the gradual implementation of a full social protection system. Introducing and maintaining or extending the floor requires the mobilization of fiscal space, both immediately and in the future. The article argues that efforts to generate fiscal space must carefully consider issues of predictability, as well as the impact of present funding choices on fiscal and debt sustainability, macroeconomic stability, inequality, poverty reduction and growth, and hence on future fiscal space. It examines from this perspective some of the implications of generating fiscal space through additional domestic resource mobilization, expenditure reallocation or efficiency gains, reduction of debt service, or external funding. The article also presents some evidence of a wide range of recent interventions that have been financed at reasonable cost on a sustainable basis in countries at different levels of income and development, using both own resources and external funds.

The Social Protection Floors Recommendation, 2012 (No. 202): Can a six‐page document change the course of social history?

AbstractIn June 2012, the global community made an important step to firmly establish social protection as part of national and global development strategies. The International Labour Conference unanimously adopted the Recommendation concerning national floors of social protection, 2012 (No. 202), providing concrete content to the human right to social security. This article puts the Recommendation into its historical standard setting and development policy context, reviews the emergence of the social protection floor concept, and analyses the contents of the new Recommendation and some of its political hotspots. It then explores whether the new instrument has the potential to change the social reality in the 185 ILO member States. It concludes that its adoption is an unprecedented demonstration of good will and far‐reaching global social policy consensus. However, in order to help create space for national policy change, the campaign to achieve at least a minimum of social security for all needs to continue and has to be kept on the international agenda. In closing, the article lists strategies that the global coalition behind this campaign needs to pursue for social security to remain or become an inalienable objective in national and international development strategies.

The social protection floor and global social governance: Towards policy synergy and cooperation between international organizations

AbstractThis article addresses the influence of the International Labour Organization (ILO) on other international organizations and global agencies which resulted in their endorsement of the Social Protection Floor (SFP) concept. By 2012 the concept had been endorsed by the United Nations in the shape of the UN Chief Executives Board's SPF‐Initiative, the World Bank in its new Social Protection and Labor Strategy and by the G20 at the Cannes Summit. Furthermore the IMF had agreed to work with the ILO to explore the options for creating fiscal space within countries to fund SPFs. Special Rapporteurs for the UN Human Rights Council had also in 2012 called for the setting up of a global fund for social protection to enable poorer countries to develop their floors. By 2012 a new coordinating authority, the Social Protection Inter‐Agency Cooperation Board (SPIAC‐B), had been ushered into existence to facilitate inter‐agency cooperation. This article describes and explains how these developments came about. It asks if the reality of increased global social governance cooperation in the field of social protection is as effective as it seems or whether there are new contradictions, overlapping and competing mandates and policy disagreements at the global level.

Revisiting policies to achieve progress towards universal health coverage in low‐income countries: Realizing the pay‐offs of national social protection floors

AbstractDespite progress on extending social health protection coverage, most low‐income countries are still far from achieving universal health coverage and thus key objectives related to improvements in health, such as those aimed at by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), will almost certainly not be realized by 2015. Principally affected are the most vulnerable populations: the rural and urban poor and workers in the informal economy and their families. It is of particular concern that progress might not only remain limited but even be reversed if policies continue to fail to address the root causes of gaps and deficits in health coverage. This article provides evidence that these causes lie both within and beyond the health sector and are strongly related to poverty and other forms of vulnerability. It argues that sustainable progress towards universal health coverage can only be achieved in an adequate time frame when focusing simultaneously on i) extending health coverage and improving access to needed health care; ii) providing income security through income support to those in need; iii) addressing limitations, or the inability to participate, in income generation from work; and iv) implementing coherent policies within and across the social, economic and health sectors that set priorities on poverty alleviation. Such policies can best be implemented in the context of national social protection floors (SPF) that focus on access to at least essential health care and on providing at least basic income security over the life cycle to all in need. Implementing SPFs may result in breaking the mutual linkages between ill health, poverty and other vulnerabilities and achieving sustainable progress towards universal health coverage and other social protection objectives.

The Social Protection Floors Recommendation, 2012 (No. 202): Completing the standards to close the coverage gap

Abstract In June 2012, the 101st session of the International Labour Conference (ILC) adopted the Recommendation concerning national floors of social protection, 2012 (No. 202). This article explores the linkages between Recommendation No. 202 and the pre‐existing International Labour Organization (ILO) social security standards and its complementarity with these. In response to the questions as to whether the existing ILO social security standards have lost their relevance and whether the new Recommendation has been adopted with a view to replacing the existing ones, the article concludes that its adoption not only complements but also broadens and strengthens the existing international social security code. Together, Recommendation No. 202 and the ILO social security Conventions are viewed as providing a complete and adequate normative framework for the establishment and maintenance of comprehensive social security systems.

A multivariable definition of adequacy: Challenges and opportunities

AbstractThe adoption of the International Labour Organization Recommendation concerning national floors of social protection, 2012 (No. 202) highlights the global importance of the extension of social security coverage. To maximize the positive impacts of coverage extension, not only should benefits and services be provided to the widest number of people and cover the greatest number of risks, but benefits have to be adequate. Whilst not without challenges, the level of coverage can be defined and measured. However, the definition of what is an adequate benefit is often less clear and has often relied on the use of one measure – the replacement ratio – to determine the relative adequacy of cash benefits. Given the multiple aims of social security systems, the use of a broader measure of adequacy that goes beyond cash benefit levels is not only more appropriate but necessary. In a context where financial constraints are arguably greater than ever, this article looks at the importance of adequacy and why such a broader consideration is required to measure the other aspects of benefit and service provision. It highlights how such a multivariable analysis could be constructed and the challenges of doing so. By attempting to measure if other goals of benefit provision are met – including quality of service, labour market aims, security of benefits and interaction with other stakeholders – the article seeks to contribute to widening the debate.

The role of national social protection floors in extending social security to all

AbstractIn June 2011 the International Labour Conference (ILC) adopted a Resolution and Conclusions setting out the Organization's new social security strategy, which aims at supporting Members in building and maintaining comprehensive social security systems on the basis of a two‐dimensional approach: (1) (“horizontal” dimension) establishing – as a priority – nationally‐defined sets of basic social security guarantees to provide a floor of protection to all in need as soon as possible; (2) (“vertical” dimension) extending the scope and levels of social security coverage as guided by Convention No. 102 (1952) and other existing social security standards to as many people as possible and as soon as possible. In June 2012, the ILC completed this strategy with a new international labour standard: Recommendation concerning national floors of social protection, 2012 (No. 202). The Recommendation is deemed a breakthrough in global social policy, whereby the establishing of national social protection floors may close prevailing gaps in social security coverage and help countries to effectively address poverty and vulnerability. This special double issue offers analysis of the process that culminated in the Recommendation's adoption and addresses practical fiscal, legal, political and institutional challenges that must be addressed if the Recommendation's goals are to be successfully implemented.

Global Climate Change Justice: Toward a Risk‐Adjusted Social Floor

SummaryAddressing climate change from social justice and human rights perspectives is a global challenge, and international negotiations dealing with climate change need to incorporate such concerns. This paper reviews existing literature on sustainable development, social justice, human rights, and climate change justice and argues that all approaches lead to a focus on providing everyone a guaranteed social minimum of basic needs, or a social floor. A social floor needs to be dynamic and flexible so that it also includes a risk adjustment (or insurance) component to compensate for the unknown direct and indirect impacts of climate change on households, communities and nations. The proposed globally guaranteed, nationally designed and managed, and locally implemented risk‐adjusted social floor is a forward‐looking approach to climate change justice that focuses on creating resilient economic, social and environmental systems that are equitable and sustainable. The risk‐adjusted social floor is based on UN agreements that guarantee human rights and basic needs, and the security of basic needs. The risk‐adjusted social floor is consistent with principles of the UN Social Protection Floor Initiative and the proposed Global Fund for Social Protection. Implementation of a risk‐adjusted social floor could draw upon existing social protection practices around the world that deliver basic needs (e.g., conditional cash transfers, use of vouchers, fee waivers, feeding programs, micro‐insurance, productive safety nets), along with advances in the use of early warning and rapid response systems to target and deliver emergency assistance. There are also innovations in global insurance instruments and risk pooling methods. The risk‐adjusted social floor integrates key aspects of risk‐based and rights‐based approaches to social protection and poverty reduction.

Index for 2013

International Social Security ReviewVolume 66, Issue 3-4 p. 209-210 Index for 2013 Index for 2013 First published: 15 October 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/issr.12027Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume66, Issue3-4Special Issue: The role of national social protection floors in extending social security to allJuly‐December 2013Pages 209-210 RelatedInformation