EURACTIV.com (12.03.2021) Spain’s government announced a deal that will recognise riders working for delivery firms such as Deliveroo and UberEats as salaried staff following complaints about their working conditions — a first in the EU. The move came six months after Spain’s leftwing government pledged to clarify the legal status of couriers working for online delivery firms, saying they should be considered employees rather than “gig” workers. It will strike at the heart of the so-called gig economy, which relies on hundreds of thousands of independent workers for app-based services such as food delivery or car rides. The government’s deal with Spanish labour unions sets up the first legislation in Europe that explicitly regulates the status of delivery workers who get around on bikes and motorcycles and whose numbers have exploded in recent years. In Spain, as in other countries, the riders have repeatedly denounced their precarious working conditions, taking legal action to demand recognition as salaried staff, which would grant them benefits such as paid holidays and sick leave. “They are now considered as salaried workers and will enjoy all the relevant protections,” Labour Minister Yolanda Diaz said in a televised address. Spain is “the first country in the European Union to legislate on the matter”, Diaz said.

reuters.com (02.05.2021) Australia's conservative government will increase childcare subsidies, officials said on Sunday, in a pre-budget announcement that pledges A$1.7 billion ($1.31 billion) to boost female participation in the workplace. The spending targets families with more than one child in daycare, boosting subsidies for those with two or more children aged up to five years-old to a maximum 95% subsidy for their second and subsequent children.

moroccoworldnews.com (28.04.2021) On April 14, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI presided over the signing of three framework agreements to generalize obligatory health insurance for a wide range of social categories, including professionals, self-employed workers, and non-salaried individuals exercising a private activity. The historic reform will cost MAD 51 billion ($5.71 billion) annually, of which MAD 23 billion ($2.57 billion) will come from the state budget. The reform includes several objectives.

ipcig.org  (09.04.2021) The fourth and last section of the Policy in Focus1 magazine analyses the social protection responses to the COVID-19 crisis in Asian countries

Bloomberg (28.04.2021) President Joe Biden will unveil on Wednesday a sweeping $1.8 trillion plan to expand educational opportunities and child care for families, funded in part by the largest tax increases on wealthy Americans in decades -- the centerpiece of his first address to a joint session of Congress. Called the American Families Plan, Biden’s third major legislative proposal combines $1 trillion in spending with $800 billion in tax cuts and credits for middle- and lower-income families. The plan would make pre-kindergarten and community college free across the country, extend the child tax credit through 2025 and make permanent an expansion of the earned income tax credit to childless adults with low incomes, provide direct support to families for child care, finance teacher training and create a national paid family leave program.

blogs.worldbank.org (26.04.2021) In the months after the first cases of COVID-19 appeared in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), countries across the region acted quickly to limit the spread of the virus. Lockdowns, curfews, and social distancing undoubtedly saved lives, but these necessary actions also constrained businesses and economies. Communities suffered from the loss of jobs and livelihoods, the closure of schools and markets, and the damage to businesses, many of which may never recover.

A bill seeking to distribute financial and production support amounting to P15,000 to at least one million small fisherfolks in the country has been filed in Congress. This, as the income of small fishermen already went down to as low as P150 per fishing trip more than a year into the pandemic. In a statement, Pambansang Lakas ng Kilusang Mamamalakaya ng Pilipinas (PAMALAKAYA) backed the said bill, which aims to “pump-prime the wheels of production” amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Estonian Medical Certificate Every person needs to have a valid medical certificate for the duration of their driving license. When a medical certificate expires, a new medical certificate must be submitted to the Road Administration. Once issued, the certificate is automatically transmitted to the motor registry.

How has Estonia applied Blockchain technology to the e-Government system? Lina Network | September 7, 2020 Blockchain is considered as the key technology in e-Government development thanks to its undeniable advantages and potential. From a technical point of view, Blockchain technology increases efficiency, provides data protection and transparency. However, many countries still face certain obstacles when applying Blockchain to e-Government. In this article, Lina Network will discuss the Blockchain application of Estonia, one of the countries with the highest level of e-Government development. Some of the technical concepts mentioned in the article will be explained in section 6.

Estonia may perhaps be the earliest adopter of distributed ledger technology at a governmental level. As early as 2007, even before the publication of the Bitcoin white paper, the Estonian government was already testing blockchain applications as part of a resolution to be resilient to outsider cyberattacks. e-Estonia, a government policy to facilitate citizen interactions with the state through the use of electronic solutions, has been testing and implementing blockchain in relation to public services for many years. So much so that blockchain is has been tested across a wide range of government services and data registries, such as the national health, judicial, legislative, security and commercial code systems, with plans to extend its use to other spheres such as personal medicine, cyber-security and data embassies. The Estonian government has harnessed the power of blockchain, which, by the very way it functions, is helping to save millions of lives and resources, while mitigating the potential manipulation of sensitive data (such as health data, intelligence information, legislation-related records, etc.) or smart devices (such as military machinery, hospital equipment, intelligent cars etc.).

Digital transformation in the health sector is not a simple matter of technical change, but requires adaptive change in human attitudes and skills as well as of legal frameworks and  the organisation of work. 

The author of this report is Karolina Socha­ Dietrich, OECD Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social  Affairs (ELS), Health Division.   This report was prepared for the 2020 German Presidency of the Council of the European Union and with  the support from the German Federal Ministry of Health (2020).  

Description

This report follows the meeting, Rehabilitation 2030: A Call for Action, organized by the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO would like to express its sincere thanks to those who participated in the meeting: representatives from Member States, UN agencies, governmental and nongovernmental organizations, editors of journals, academia, institutions and WHO collaborating centres.

socialeurope.eu (20.04.2021) The labour status of people working in the online platform economy is key to their socio-economic protection. But it has proven a difficult issue for courts and regulators. The European Union is considering introducing a ‘rebuttable presumption of employment’ to help address this problem. What could this entail exactly? 

Le Maroc a annoncé avoir lancé auprès de 9 millions de bénéficiaires son plan de généralisation de la couverture sociale destiné à terme à couvrir 22 millions de personnes actuellement dépourvues d'assurance maladie. Les agriculteurs, les artisans, les commerçants, les professionnels indépendants et leurs familles seront les premiers inclus dans le régime de l'assurance maladie obligatoire (AMO) en 2021 et 2022. L'AMO s'étendra ensuite aux travailleurs des autres secteurs « dans la perspective de la généralisation effective de la protection sociale à tous les citoyens ».

The World Bank (March 2021) The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered one of the largest economic downturns since the Great Depression. Beyond its devastating effect on health, morbidity, and mortality, the pandemic shook economies and labor markets around the globe, leaving no firm, worker, and household untouched. Governments responded to the crisis with a series of public health and containment measures that deeply affected societies and economies, including the supply and demand for goods, capital, and labor. These were accompanied by a series of social, financial, and macroeconomic policies aimed at mitigating the economic effects of the crisis. In low- (LICs) and middle-income (MICs) countries alone, over 1,300 labor market and social protection interventions have been introduced since the start of the pandemic.1 These policies often included a mix of social assistance, social insurance, and labor market interventions, with 98 percent of countries in the sample announcing at least one labor market policy or one social assistance policy, and 60 percent announcing at least one social insurance policy.

dol.gov (06.03.2121)

The U.S. Senate approved a Republican measure setting federal unemployment benefits for those made jobless by the coronavirus pandemic at $300 per week, as part of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill.

gov.cn (26.01.2021)

Considering that the risk of the pandemic still exists, some enterprises may be under great financial pressure, the policy of phased reduction of premium rates of unemployment insurance and work injury insurance will be extended for another year until 30 April 2022.

Monash University (12.04.2021) As the pandemic-related shutdown intensified across Australia from March 2020, temporary and undocumented migrants and their advocates warned of devastating impacts on migrant workers and international students who were simultaneously losing their incomes while being excluded from social security benefits.

Since then, research indicates that the pandemic has deepened inequality for temporary and undocumented migrant workers, who are disproportionately employed in precarious and insecure work.

theconversation.com (29.03.2021) Since the mid-1990s, new approaches to poverty reduction have been introduced in countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Some have involved income transfer programmes that target poorer citizens based on various means tests. Most have targeted female caregivers, primarily mothers. The most expansive child and family grants are in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Argentina and South Africa, which has put in place the biggest social provision net in Africa. The focus of our study was on Brazil and South Africa, two of the countries that have the largest programmes globally. The programmes were all designed to enhance child welfare.

Reuters (07.04.2020) Oman on Wednesday restructured its pension and social protections systems, part of a reform push by the Gulf Arab state wrestling with an economy battered by low oil prices and the coronavirus pandemic.

ilo.org (March 2021) This brief is part of the policy resource Package Extending social security and facilitating transition from the informal to the formal economy. Lessons from international experience.

blogs.worldbank.org (30:03.2021) Developing countries have introduced an unprecedented number of social protection and jobs policies to mitigate the effects of the crisis.  Over the past year, developing countries have introduced more than 1,300 crisis-related social protection and jobs (SPJ) policies. That figure is based on data from the COVID-19 SPJ Policy Inventory for 55 countries, representing 80 percent of the population in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). The Inventory added policies related to labor demand to the already comprehensive social protection and jobs programs collected by Gentilini et al. (2020). These measures exceeded the crisis-related social protection and jobs policies witnessed over two years of the global financial crisis (2008-2009) for a comparable set of developing countries.  

Those who receive disability pension must submit the disability pension medical certificate to the Japan Pension Service by the deadline, and if it is not submitted by the deadline, the disability pension payment is usually suspended. It will be. It is said that the disability pension medical certificate can be prepared for 3 months, but those who live in the target area of ​​the state of emergency (period: January 8th, 3rd to March 21st, 3rd year of Reiwa) and the area It is also possible that people who visit a medical institution in the target area across the board may not be able to see a medical institution and may not be able to carry out normal procedures smoothly.