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"Preface" [2019] ELECD 1071; in Westerveld, Mies; Olivier, Marius (eds), "Social Security Outside the Realm of the Employment Contract" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) x

Book Title: Social Security Outside the Realm of the Employment Contract

Editor(s): Westerveld, Mies; Olivier, Marius

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Section Title: Preface

Number of pages: 11

Extract:

Preface
This book aims to build a bridge between policy makers and researchers
who are working on similar issues within different frameworks and from
varying perspectives. The central theme of the book is the organisation of
social security for workers for whom the organisational device of the
labour contract is missing. The theme is global, but the challenges
governments are facing differ, if not from country to country then from
region to region. In countries in the global south the main obstacle
appears to be that the majority of work takes place in the informal
economy, which is by nature hard to reach for formal institutions and
remains largely uncovered from a social security perspective. Countries
in the global north face the fact that the standard employment contract,
originally a useful device for social insurance arrangements, is in retreat.
Some researchers even claim that the labour contract is `dead'. This
development is especially troublesome for social security given its close
connection with the concept of employment insurance. Countries that
have built their systems on the concept of resident-related insurance, on
the other hand, must acknowledge that residency has become fluid,
perhaps even more so than in the past.
The fact that the ultimate goals of social security are not being met has
not gone unnoticed. In 1999 the International Labour Organization (ILO)
called for an expansion of social security coverage also in poorer
countries. Over the years the realisation that this target is complicated, if
not illusionary, in countries ...