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These six building blocks – including solid protection floors, sustainable financing, and gender‑responsive design – give HR leaders a practical framework to strengthen their employee value proposition, improve workforce wellbeing, and build organisational resilience.
As labour markets are reshaped by climate change, demographic shifts, technological progress and broader structural changes, social protection becomes increasingly central. It cushions people and economies against shocks and stresses, while also supporting social and economic development.
A recent policy paper by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), Universal social protection in changing labour markets: Protecting workers in all types of employment, highlighted that in this rapidly evolving context, strong social protection systems are crucial for helping individuals, societies, and economies manage transition and uncertainty. To repair and renew increasingly fragile social contracts, social protection must assume a more prominent role.
This means only reinforcing social protection systems – including establishing and expanding social protection floors – but also improving policy coherence and coordinating social protection with other relevant policy areas.
Below are some of the broad categories of social protection schemes, starting with the mechanisms with the strongest link to employment:
- Protection mechanisms linked to a contract with a specific employer.
- These benefits may be legally required (through labour or social security laws) or offered voluntarily by the employer. Because they are attached to a specific employment contract, they are usually lost when that contract ends. As a result, some workers – for example, part-time or temporary workers – may not qualify, and often have limited ability to contest decisions, even where grievance procedures exist.
- Protection mechanisms linked to employment in a specific sector or occupation.
- Such schemes face the challenge that benefits may be lost if workers move to a different sector or occupation. However, when workers change sector or occupation, they may lose access to benefits. Such mechanisms can offer valuable supplementary protection, but they are less suitable as the primary guarantee of basic income or services.
- Social protection linked to salaried employment, which typically includes social insurance schemes.
- Here, entitlements are connected to employee status rather than to a single employer. Workers who change jobs usually retain coverage and may remain protected during periods of unemployment or short breaks in work.
- While most salaried workers (including part-time and temporary workers) are included in principle, some may be legally or effectively excluded if they do not meet minimum requirements in terms of duration of employment or regular working hours.
- Social protection linked to participation in employment (including self-employment), which may be provided through social insurance (if open to self-employed and other non-salaried workers) or other mechanisms.
- These types of schemes are more inclusive than those limited to employees only, particularly where low-income earners benefit from subsidised coverage.
- Social protection linked to residency status, which is usually provided through tax-financed schemes, whether means-tested or not.
- Benefits provided by programmes in this category are not linked to employment status. In fact, these programmes may even explicitly exclude those in employment, as in the case of schemes targeting people out of work.
- While non-means-tested programmes are provided on an individual basis, some social assistance benefits are based on the resources of the household and are being paid to the head of household, which can limit access for young people and women with insufficient resources.
A better visualisation of the social protection schemes can be seen in the table below:
Strengthening and adapting social protection systems to respond to changing labour markets
In a world marked by greater uncertainty and frequent shocks, building stronger and more adaptable social protection systems has become an urgent necessity for sustainable social and economic development. Social protection should not only step in when people are already in crisis; it should also tackle the underlying drivers of poverty and insecurity. That means putting in place solid systems that lower vulnerability, build people’s capacities and prevent them from falling into poverty in the first place.
This requires moving beyond a poverty-targeting paradigm towards comprehensive social protection systems that provide protection throughout the life cycle through a combination of broad-based contributory and non-contributory schemes.
According to the ILO, establishing national social protection floors for everyone who needs protection is a key starting point. At the same time, countries should aim to move progressively towards higher levels of protection for as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.
Against this backdrop, the ILO identified six core priorities for strengthening and adapting social protection systems so they can keep pace with rapidly changing labour markets:
#1 Make social insurance more inclusive for all types of labour markets
To reduce vulnerability and prevent poverty, social insurance must cover workers beyond standard, formal employment. This means:
- extending legal coverage to groups often excluded (domestic workers, agricultural workers, workers in micro-enterprises, self-employed and platform workers),
- simplifying registration and contribution procedures,
- adapting and subsidising contributions for those with low or irregular incomes, and
- ensuring rural and hard‑to‑reach populations can enrol and pay contributions easily.
Design and implementation should be based on inclusive tripartite social dialogue and consultations with organisations representing the workers concerned, and should support transitions from informal to formal work.
#2 Guarantee a solid social protection floor
To provide basic, life‑cycle protection and prevent people from falling into poverty, countries should establish and maintain nationally defined social protection floors that ensure:
- income security and access to health care for all who need protection,
- universal or broad-based non-contributory schemes (e.g. child benefits, disability benefits, pensions),
- social insurance that includes those with limited contributory capacity and guarantees minimum benefits, and
- rights-based social assistance so no one is left unprotected.
These measures should be coordinated with employment, skills, childcare and long‑term care policies to support entry and reintegration into decent work.
#3 Secure adequate, sustainable and fair financing
To achieve universal coverage and higher levels of protection, countries must close the social protection financing gap by:
- expanding fiscal space for social protection, especially in low- and middle-income countries,
- relying on domestic resource mobilisation, particularly progressive taxation and social security contributions,
- using innovative financing where appropriate (e.g. non-individualised contributions from contracting parties in specific sectors), and
- mobilising international solidarity where national resources are insufficient, especially in countries heavily affected by climate change.
Financing strategies should support nationally owned systems that can be scaled up over time.
#4 Ensure inclusive social dialogue and safeguard labour rights
To sustain and adapt social protection in a context of rapid change, reforms must be built on trust, transparency and participation. This requires:
- a strong respect for fundamental labour rights,
- tripartite governance of social security schemes (government, workers, employers),
- social dialogue in designing reforms, expanding coverage and building social protection floors, and
- structured involvement of organisations representing informal and other previously excluded workers.
Robust dialogue mechanisms are essential for negotiating the distribution of costs and benefits and maintaining the social contract in the face of labour market transformations.
#5 Build gender-responsive social protection systems
To address structural gender inequalities and prevent women’s disproportionate exposure to poverty and insecurity, social protection systems should:
- strengthen social insurance so it accommodates interrupted careers and diverse work patterns,
- design non-contributory schemes with individualised entitlements, not only household-based targeting,
- link social protection to broader measures addressing unequal pay, unequal access to quality employment and unequal care responsibilities, and
- invest in care policies and services (childcare, long‑term care, parental and care leave, universal child benefits) that support women’s employment, income security and autonomy.
These measures benefit not only women but all workers with non-standard or discontinuous employment histories.
#6 Promote policy coherence and integrated approaches
To provide continuous, life‑cycle protection in changing labour markets, social protection must be part of an integrated national strategy that:
- combines contributory and tax-financed schemes into a coherent system based on universality, adequacy and sustainability,
- ensures portability and continuity of protection as workers move between jobs, sectors, forms of employment and countries,
- aligns incentives so that governments expand contributory coverage and individuals are encouraged to contribute while guaranteed minimum protections remain, and
- is coordinated with employment, tax, enterprise, skills and digitalisation policies to support formalisation, productive employment and compliance.
Integrated systems are better able to manage transitions, share risks broadly and prevent people from falling into poverty amid economic, demographic and climate-related shocks.
READ MORE: Behind the numbers: What the ILO’s 2026 jobs outlook says about work today
Infographics / ILO
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